parcelling

• parceling

parcelling

1. (British) present participle and gerund of parcel

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.