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Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
grinding
adjective
COLLOCATIONS FROM OTHER ENTRIES
a grinding halt (=one that happens slowly – used for emphasis)
▪ One accident can bring the whole road system to a grinding halt.
abject/grinding/dire poverty (=extremely severe)
▪ He was shocked by the abject poverty that he saw.
COLLOCATIONS FROM CORPUS
■ NOUN
corn
▪ Today, Oil Mill is still at work grinding corn, much of the original structure still surviving.
▪ On the far side of the village was a small water mill, probably used for grinding corn.
▪ The Apache women rubbing skins and grinding corn, their hair greasy and full of vermin.
▪ Much of the original wooden machinery is intact - it was used to drive two pairs of millstones for grinding corn.
▪ Damsell's was one of the latter for, by the mid-1840s the firm of Lord and Archer were grinding corn there.
▪ The mill was used for grinding corn until the seventeenth century.
▪ Although no longer used commercially, it was apparently put to occasional use grinding corn up to the start of the First World War.
poverty
▪ There is no visible grinding poverty and no antagonism towards tourists.
▪ Yet, regrettably, the lasting impression is of a merely superficial look at grinding poverty.
▪ Their first years together were a time of grinding poverty.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ A grinding ache grew within her, grew and intensified.
▪ A terrible grinding crunch struck at us like a solid barrier.
▪ There is no visible grinding poverty and no antagonism towards tourists.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Grinding

Grind \Grind\, v. t. [imp. & p. p. Ground; p. pr. & vb. n. Grinding.] [AS. grindan; perh. akin to L. frendere to gnash, grind. Cf. Grist.]

  1. To reduce to powder by friction, as in a mill, or with the teeth; to crush into small fragments; to produce as by the action of millstones.

    Take the millstones, and grind meal.
    --Is. xivii.

  2. 2. To wear down, polish, or sharpen, by friction; to make smooth, sharp, or pointed; to whet, as a knife or drill; to rub against one another, as teeth, etc.

  3. To oppress by severe exactions; to harass.

    To grind the subject or defraud the prince.
    --Dryden.

  4. To study hard for examination; -- commonly used with away; as, to grind away at one's studies. [College Slang]

Grinding

Grinding \Grind"ing\, a. & n. from Grind. Grinding frame, an English name for a cotton spinning machine. Grinding mill.

  1. A mill for grinding grain.

  2. A lapidary's lathe.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
grinding

past participle adjective from grind (v.). Meaning "oppressive" is from 1580s. The verbal noun is from mid-14c.

Wiktionary
grinding
  1. Of or pertaining to the act or sound of grinding. n. 1 The action of grinding together or crushing into small particles. 2 (context dance English) A form of dance in which two people rub their bodies together. 3 (context online gaming English) Repeatedly performing the same quest or similar in-game activity in order to amass points or wealth. v

  2. (present participle of grind English)

WordNet
grinding
  1. n. matter resulting from the process of grinding; "vegetable grindings clogged the drain"

  2. a harsh and strident sound (as of the grinding of gears)

  3. the wearing down of rock particles by friction due to water or wind or ice [syn: abrasion, attrition, detrition]

Wikipedia
Grinding (video gaming)

Grinding is a term used in video gaming to describe the process of engaging in repetitive tasks. The most common usage is in the context of MMORPGs like Realm of the Mad God, World of Warcraft, or Lineage in which it is often necessary for a character to repeatedly kill AI-controlled monsters, using basically the same strategy over and over again to advance their character level to be able to access newer content. MUDs, generally sharing much of the same gameplay as MMORPGs, often feature grinding as well. Grinding may be required by some games to unlock additional features such as level progression or additional items.

Synonyms for grinding include the figurative terms treadmilling (a comparison with exercise treadmills) and pushing the bar (it can be a reference to a weightlifter "pushing the bar" on a bench press, over and over to get muscle gains, or a reference to Skinner boxes in which animals, having learned that pushing a button will sometimes produce a treat, will devote time to pushing the bar over and over again , or also can be a graphical reference to push the character's experience bar to higher values). Related terms include farming (in which the repetition is undertaken in order to obtain items, relating the activity to tending a farm field), and catassing, which refers to extended or obsessive play sessions. Used as a noun, a grind (or treadmill) is a designed in-game aspect which requires the player to engage in grinding.

Grinding is a controversial subject among players. Many do not enjoy it, and disparage it as a symptom of poor or uninspired game design. Others embrace it, claiming that all games feature grinding to some extent, or claim to enjoy the practice of regular grinding. Some games, especially free-to-play games, allow players to bypass grinding by paying additional fees.

Grinding (dance)

Grinding, also known as juking, freak dancing or freaking (in the Caribbean, wining) is a type of close partner dance where two or more dancers rub or bump their bodies against each other, generally with a female dancer rubbing her buttocks against a male dancer's crotch area.

Grinding gained widespread popularity as a hip hop dance in night clubs, and eventually moved on to high school and middle school dances (especially proms) in the US and Canada where there have been cases of administrators attempting to ban it due to its explicit nature.

A predecessor to grinding as a sexually charged high-contact social dance was " The Bump", popular in the 1970s, in which the contact between partners generally involved the hips or buttocks of one dancer "bumping" those of the other dancer in temporary contact. Other predecessor elements of grinding may be attributed to the 1987 film Dirty Dancing, and the lambada, a brief dance craze of the 1980s that featured grinding actions, as seen in the films The Forbidden Dance and Lambada. A more explicit form of the dance is known as daggering.

Grinding (abrasive cutting)

Grinding is an abrasive machining process that uses a grinding wheel as the cutting tool.

A wide variety of machines are used for grinding:

  • Hand-cranked knife-sharpening stones ( grindstones)
  • Handheld power tools such as angle grinders and die grinders
  • Various kinds of expensive industrial machine tools called grinding machines
  • Bench grinders often found in residential garages and basements

Grinding practice is a large and diverse area of manufacturing and toolmaking. It can produce very fine finishes and very accurate dimensions; yet in mass production contexts it can also rough out large volumes of metal quite rapidly. It is usually better suited to the machining of very hard materials than is "regular" machining (that is, cutting larger chips with cutting tools such as tool bits or milling cutters), and until recent decades it was the only practical way to machine such materials as hardened steels. Compared to "regular" machining, it is usually better suited to taking very shallow cuts, such as reducing a shaft’s diameter by half a thousandth of an inch or 12.7 μm.

Grinding is a subset of cutting, as grinding is a true metal-cutting process. Each grain of abrasive functions as a microscopic single-point cutting edge (although of high negative rake angle), and shears a tiny chip that is analogous to what would conventionally be called a "cut" chip (turning, milling, drilling, tapping, etc.) . However, among people who work in the machining fields, the term cutting is often understood to refer to the macroscopic cutting operations, and grinding is often mentally categorized as a "separate" process. This is why the terms are usually used in separately in shop-floor practice.

Lapping and sanding are subsets of grinding.

Usage examples of "grinding".

Thirty miles of grinding, growling, gravel road later, they reached Abney, a once-booming mining town that had long since withered and now had trouble remembering why it was there.

Away in the backblocks, on the contrary, one becomes a mere machine, grinding through hard tasks--not a pleasant change while so much is going on.

With resounding crashes the structure parted at the weakened points, the furious upheaval stopped, and, the tractor beams shut off, the shattered, smoking, erupting mass of wreckage fell in clashing, grinding ruin upon the city.

Gears -engaged with a clatter, bearings began grinding just audibly beneath the music, and the canvas began moving slowly across the stage, feeding from the full spool toward the empty.

Lorcan, and marched through the room, grinding torn streamers into the carpet, kicking withered-looking balloons out of the way, Benjy scurrying behind him.

Yet there are men still living, and boys who have grown to manhood, scores of them, who toiled for years in the black dust breathed out from its throats of iron, and listened to the thunder of its grinding jaws from dawn to dark of many and many a day.

Grindings and raspings came from the accursed object while Burman battered it to pieces.

Drum and cymbals broke the growling chant with a blow of fierce emphasis, and the voices all together held one long, grinding note that was like the dragging of a boulder over rock.

The war was stalemated, which meant the superior forces of the Dons were slowly grinding the Republicans down.

Both of them stepped back as a grinding started from within, then slowly the black doorstone rolled to the left and warm air gushed out to wash over us.

In the whistle of the wind and the monstrous grinding of the dragline, his voice was nothing and carried nowhere.

Next, the dyer needed to prepare the dyebath, either by boiling and straining plant matter or by grinding prepared dyestuffs.

In addition to water and fuel, the dyers needed copper vats for preparing dyebaths, wooden vats for dyeing the fabric, furnaces for heating the water and boiling the dyes, hooks, rods, barrows and winches to move the fabric around, tools for grinding the dyestuffs, the dyestuffs themselves, mordants, and a building large enough to use and store it all.

The narrow, eellike head reached out of the wave wall and snapped at it viciously, teeth grinding on the sharp metal.

Meanwhile Milo Shipp, author, a thin man in a bow tie, sat in a wooden chair stunned, with a cookie in one hand and a large cocker spaniel on his lap, while a young boy grinding an eggbeater ran in and out of the room.