[f. WHITEN v. + -ING1.]
1. The action, or a process, of making white; bleaching, whitewashing, tinning, etc.; also fig. Also, the fact or process of becoming while.
1601. Holland, Pliny, XXXI. xi. II. 423. An artificiall devise to make spunges looke white;… if the softest … be … bathed … in the fome of salt: after which they ought to be laid abroad in the moon-shine,… that thereby they may take their whitening.
1705. Addison, Italy, etc., 489. They have … great Commodities for Whitening [= bleaching].
1713. Guardian, No. 109, ¶ 6. Our Faces debar us from all artificial Whitenings.
1839. Ure, Dict. Arts, 956. Pin manufacture…. 9. Whitening or tinning.
1854. R. H. Patterson, Ess. Hist. & Art (1862), 34. Whitening of the seams—a disagreeable vestiarian phenomenon produced by the surface … of the cloth being rubbed off.
1857. Miller, Elem. Chem., Org. (1862), xi. § 2. 773. After another scraping on the flesh side, or whitening, it [sc. the skin] is ready to be stored away.
1877. Paper hanger, etc., 69. If the ceiling is a new one, prime with water, soft soap, and a little lime before whitening.
1878. Seeley, Stein, II. 401. That popular agitation, that first whitening of the waves for the storm of the Anti-Napoleonic Revolution.
1891. Athenæum, 26 Dec., 870/2. It goes too far in its blackening of Macbeth and in its whitening of Lady Macbeth.
2. concr. = WHITING vbl. sb. 4.
1710. Lady G. Baillie, Househ. Bk. (S.H.S., 1911), 84. For whittining to the wals 1s. 3d.
1823. J. Badcock, Dom. Amusem., 29. Derbyshire stone, whitening and plaister of Paris.
1905. ‘G. Travers,’ Growth, i. 5. The smell of moisture and bathbrick and whitening.
3. attrib. and Comb.
1797. Mme. D’Arblay, Diary, Lett. to Mrs. Francis, 16 Nov. The silver of our plated [spoons] having feloniously made off under cover of the whitening-brush.
1800. Hull Advertiser, 7 June, 2/3. The warehouses, whitening-house,… whitening and painting mills.
1826. Galt, Last of Lairds, xxxiv. 304. Jenny … was … whitewashing the lintels of the lower windows with an old hearth-brush; her whitening-pot was a handless and cripple tureen.
1875. Knight, Dict. Mech., Whitening-machine. A machine for removing the red skin or cuticle from the grain of rice after the outer husk has been hulled off.
