Showing results for "mining"

• present participle of mine.

mining

American  

[mahy-ning] / ˈmaɪ nɪŋ /

noun

• minings
  plural

1. the act, process, or industry of extracting ores, coal, etc., from mines.

2. the laying of explosive mines.

3. Digital Technology. the act or process by which cryptocurrency transactions, especially bitcoin, are verified and new cryptocurrency is generated: computer networks are used to solve sets of mathematical problems, that, when solved, yield a unit of that currency.

---

mining British  

/ ˈmaɪnɪŋ /

noun

1. the act, process, or industry of extracting coal, ores, etc, from the earth

2. military the process of laying mines

---

Other Word Forms

Noun Inflected Forms

• minings
  plural

---

Etymology

Origin of mining

First recorded in 1250–1300; Middle English: “undermining (walls in an attack)”; mine ² + -ing ¹

---

Explanation

The process of removing something valuable from underground is mining. In order for coal to be used as fuel, it has to first be extracted from sedimentary rock through mining. Mining is used to extract minerals, gemstones, oil, gas, and any other materials that are useful or valuable enough to make the process worthwhile. Digging up substances from the earth is always tedious and sometimes dangerous. Coal mining is notoriously unhealthy for its workers, and surface mining involves blasting rocks with explosives to extract precious metals. You can think of mining as a kind of underground tunneling, from the verb mine, "to dig a tunnel."

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

mining minings

Production paused in Season 1 when a mining symposium took over the town’s hotels.

From Los Angeles Times ● Nov. 6, 2026

Last week, we reported on mining retired wind turbines for rare earths.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Nov. 6, 2026

Becerra may also be sympathetic to environmental justice communities — poorer neighborhoods, often of color — that have experienced disproportionately negative effects from extraction industries such as oil drilling and mining.

From Los Angeles Times ● Nov. 5, 2026

Silica is finer, more insidious than coal dust and, as the show points out, not always subject to mining regulations.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Nov. 5, 2026

“But it is having communication problems. I was sent here to deliver your new orders. Crusher, you have been ordered to stop all mining activity and await further instructions.”

From "The Wild Robot Protects" by Peter Brown

On Capitol Hill, the Reagan Administration was engaged in some belated fence mending with Congress following the furor raised three weeks ago by legislators who charged that they had been inadequately briefed on the minings.

From Time Magazine Archive

He had no genius for the tactics of intrigue; your reconnoiterings, and marchings, and countermarchings, sappings, and minings, assaults, sometimes surrenders, and sometimes repulses.

From Coningsby by Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield

Nowhere for me, in these extensive minings and siftings.

From History of Friedrich II of Prussia — Volume 16 by Thomas Carlyle

Provided the differences amount not to an insolent opposition of Laws, and Government, or Religion established, as to the essentials of them, such motions and minings are intolerable.

From Eikon Basilike The Pourtracture of His Sacred Majestie, in His Solitudes and Sufferings by King of England Charles I

Nothing would be done on either side but stick-in-the-mud warfare and those trench-raids and minings which had no object except "to keep up the spirit of the men."

From Now It Can Be Told by Philip Gibbs

Random Word

Spin the wheel and learn a new word!

---

Related Words

• drilling

---