Definition of "boning"

boning

/ˈbəʊnɪŋ/

verb
1. present participle and gerund of bone
noun
plural bonings
1. The removal of bones from a carcass; filleting.
2. The arrangement of bones in a corset.
3. (slang, vulgar) An act of sexual intercourse.
  Quotations
  How is it possible that somebody who looks like Thinny can have sex with so many women? Where are all these girls out there begging for bonings in cars?
  2012, John van de Ruit, Spud - Exit, Pursued by a Bear
4. Bone structure.
  Quotations
  She had substantial boning and a wider pelvic girdle than our larger bitch.
  2008, Carolyn Melvin, Life with Animals, page 168
  She had a perfect nose, narrow and faintly sloped at the end to give it character. It fit the delicate boning of her face, the slightly raised cheekbones one could only fully appreciate in profile, the generous mouth.
  2012, Bronwyn Scott, How to Disgrace a Lady, page 95
  This is a breed that's a medium size with a short, cobby body and heavy boning.
  2013, Benjamin L. Hart, Lynette A. Hart, Your Ideal Cat
5. The fertilization of a field with bone meal.
  Quotations
  The long-continued good result of the bonings of the Cheshire farmers, effects which are said to be perceivable during the continuance of a lease, demonstrates that at least one known fertilizer is useful not merely for a season; and, moreover, as the enlightened Cheshire landlords have been long wont even to aid their tenantry in the requisite outlay for the bones, this further seems to prove that the land is not finally rendered less valuable by the more bountiful, and consequently more exhausting crops of grass that it is thus enabled to produce.
  1858, The Farmer's Magazine, page 364
  Of the 84½ acres of pasture, 55 acres is one field, formerly eight, a mile distant from homestead ; it presents a good herbage, the result of repeated bonings.
  1872, The Country Gentleman's Magazine - Volume 9, page 358
  The soil, which was often only a few inches deep, and had hitherto been incapable of bearing crops was transformed by chalking, boning, by the planting of turnips, which, when eaten off by sheep, returned a rich manure to the ground, and by the use of oil cake for sheep feeding which enriched the land still further.
  2013, Joan Thirsk, English Peasant Farming, page 257
6. The process or result of leveling using a boning rod.
  Quotations
  Boning is performed with boning rods, which exactly resemble T squares, as shown in fig 1 (page 265).
  1900, Arthur Thomas Walmisley, Field work and instruments, page 264
  The curbs being thus relaid to “bonings," they form the level from which all others are taken.
  1913, Proceedings of the Institution of Municipal Engineers
  This kind of boning would probably have been done crosswise over all four corners.
  1991, Dieter Arnold, Building in Egypt: Pharaonic Stone Masonry, page 256
7. Placement of a curse by pointing with a bone, practiced by Australian aborigines; an act of pointing the bone.
  Quotations
  The practice of 'boning' was particularly discouraged. Mrs Duncan Kemp remembered that on one occasion the white stockmen on her father's station had tied up an Aboriginal man and soundly beaten him after he had ignored repeated warnings about his 'boning' activities.
  1994, Dawn May, Aboriginal Labour and the Cattle Industry, page 87
  As I say, Stagirius's symptons may well resemble those of an Aboriginal victim of boning.
  2004, Peter G. Toohey, Peter M. Toohey, Melancholy, Love, and Time: Boundaries of the Self in Ancient Literature, page 139
  But the will to live, the will to achieve, was still strong, and with devastating suddenness it rebelled against the inevitability of the boning.
  2018, Arthur W. Upfield, The Bone is Pointed