scraping
Americannoun
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the act of a person or thing that scrapes.
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the sound of something being scraped.
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Usually scrapings. something that is scraped off, up, or together.
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Digital Technology. the process of extracting data from a digital source for automated replication, formatting, or manipulation by a computer program, as in data mining or website data analysis: web scraping;
screen scraping;
web scraping;
URL scraping.
noun
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the act of scraping
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a sound produced by scraping
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(often plural) something scraped off, together, or up; a small amount
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Nouns
Etymology
Origin of scraping
A late Middle English word dating back to 1400–50; see origin at scrape, -ing 1
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
Last week, the government’s own energy statisticians published an explainer on the term, because, at one of America’s most important oil hubs, prices now suggest the tanks may already be scraping bottom.
From MarketWatch ● Jul. 21, 2026
A key survey of American consumers is scraping bottom, showing they’ve never felt this lousy about the economy, even at the height of recessions or when the Covid pandemic raged.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 10, 2026
I mean, people have been scraping the whole web since the first search engine.
From Salon ● Jun. 22, 2026
He has taken full advantage of scraping into the Roland Garros main draw and spent almost 20 hours playing as he moved through the rounds.
From BBC ● Jun. 5, 2026
There’s a terrible scraping of chairs and shuffling of shoes.
From "Muffled" by Jennifer Gennari
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More problems were found at a factory that Sun had acquired in Detroit, where the diabetes drug metformin was contaminated with metal scrapings.
From Salon ● Jun. 18, 2025
The samples gathered in 1984 included locks of Mary's hair and nail scrapings.
From BBC ● Jan. 16, 2025
But at our earliest opportunity, humans also sought to profit from these substances: scrapings from a Neandertal's teeth show traces of toxins that held medicinal value, including the bases for aspirin and penicillin.
From Scientific American ● Oct. 1, 2023
A pile of leaves and stalks that could be chopped up and mixed with the scrapings from a chicken coop and some old, spent coffee grounds.
From New York Times ● Aug. 11, 2021
There were scrapings on the big stones and perfectly round stones that Joe said were shaped by huge slides of ice that were in that very spot about a million years ago—or maybe a billion.
From "Miracles on Maple Hill" by Virginia Sorensen
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Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.