tapping

English

Pronunciation

• Rhymes: -æpɪŋ

Noun

tapping (countable and uncountable, plural tappings)

1. An act of making a light hit or strike against something.
   • 1897, Bram Stoker, chapter 20, in Dracula, New York, N.Y.: Modern Library, →OCLC:

     As he was speaking there was a soft tapping at the door. I went over and opened it […]

   • 2009 June 26, Alastair Macaulay, “Leading the Audience Into Flamenco’s Heart”, in New York Times‎^[1]:

     She has rapid and powerful footwork, but she doesn’t wow you with any special trills or woodpecker tappings.

2. (music) A guitar technique in which the strings are tapped against the fingerboard
3. The process by which a resource is tapped or exploited.
   • 1938, Paul Burke Jacobs, Harry Paul Newton, Motor Fuels from Farm Products, page 99:

     Competitive tappings of a common oil pool can lead only to waste and overproduction, unless rigidly regulated […]

4. (electrical engineering) A connection made to some point between the end terminals of a transformer coil or other component.
   • 1962 June, “Talking of Trains: Notable new locomotives”, in Modern Railways, page 373:

     The essential feature is that two adjacent transformer tappings are connected to the load simultaneously, each connection having a self-excited transductor in series; […] .

Verb

tapping

1. present participle and gerund of tap

Related terms

• foot-tapping
• hot tapping
• self-tapping
• self-tapping screw
• tappingly
• tapping up
• toe-tapping

 

References

• “tapping”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022.