parcelling

English

Alternative forms

• parceling

Verb

parcelling

1. (British) present participle and gerund of parcel

Noun

parcelling (plural parcellings)

1. (nautical) One of the long, narrow slips of canvas daubed with tar and wound about a rope like a bandage, before it is served; used also in mousing on the stays, etc.
   • 1840, Richard Henry Dana, Two Years Before the Mast: A Personal Narrative of Life at Sea, page 453:

     The wind continuing very light; all hands were sent aloft to strip off the chafing gear; and battens, parcellings, roundings, hoops, mats, and leathers, came flying from aloft, and left the rigging neat and clean, stripped of all its sea bandaging.

   • 2018, D.J. House, Seamanship Techniques: Shipboard and Marine Operations:

     This effectively prepares the way for the parcelling to produce a smooth finish, prior to serving.

2. A system for dividing something up.
   • 1858, Thomas Carlyle, History of Friedrich II of Prussia: Volume 2:

     […] these are posterior Divisions, fallen upon as Brandenburg (under Albert chiefly) enlarged itself, and needed new Official parcellings into departments.

   • 1959, The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science - Volume 9, page 19:

     That many different parcellings of phenomena for the purposes of theoretical explanation are conceivable does not however show that these parcellings can be quite arbitrary.

   • 1991, Édouard Maunick, Fragments of a Private Iconography of the Sea:

     Spaces of the imagination rather than tidy parcellings.

3. (more specifically) The division of land into parcels.
   • 1913 February, George Goṡcicki, “Agrarian Conditions in the Kingdom of Poland”, in Russian Review: A Quarterly Review of Russian History, Politics, Economics, and Literature, volume 2, number 1, page 74:

     The parcelling of large estates into smaller agricultural units swelled the area of peasants' land by 1,759,000 acres.

   • 1973, Urban Land Policies and Land-use Control Measures, page 123:

     Another category of norms is valid for parcellings taking place after 2 December 1966 , but preceding the date ( 1 September 1967) when the Lege Ponte entered into force; while a third category of norms applies to parcellings carried out after 1 September 1967.

   • 2003, Dennis Howard Green, ‎Frank Siegmund, The Continental Saxons from the Migration Period to the Tenth Century, page 38:

     Near the coast, tidal creeks and high marshland formed a landscape with irregular parcellings.

4. The manner in which something is structured or packaged for sale, including the use of a specific size, material, color, font, etc.
   • 1893, Bankers' Magazine, page 266:

     Most of the commodities have their own special parcellings, in the absence of which its market would be impeded and prices would have a tendency to become artificial.

   • 1926, Lloyd's Packing Warehouses Ltd, The Story of the Bale, page 17:

     They may have special shades of paper stamps or "chops," tickets, tapes, ribbons, and parcellings.

   • 2019, Elena N. Malyuga, Functional Approach to Professional Discourse Exploration in Linguistics, page 88:

     The smallest number of parcellings are found in the group of small volume texts—in 1.5% of cases. In advertising of medium volume, parcellings are used in 14% of texts.