Definition of "smoothing"

smoothing

verb
1. present participle and gerund of smooth
noun
plural smoothings
1. The act by which something is made smooth.
  Quotations
  For, as I draw closer and closer to the end, I travel in the circle, nearer and nearer to the beginning. It seems to be one of the kind smoothings and preparings of the way.
  1859, Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
2. (phonetics, phonology) Monophthongization.
3. (statistics) creation of an approximating function that attempts to capture important patterns in the data, while leaving out noise or other fine-scale structures/rapid phenomena.