floating

1. not comparableThat floats or float.

   floating buoys

2. not comparableNot fixed in position, opinion etc.; free to move or drift.

   You can drag the floating toolbars to any position on the screen.

   3 more examples

   The outcome of the forthcoming election is still unclear due to the large number of floating voters.

   In China, the large floating population has tended to gravitate to cities.

   "And I am much mistaken if she has not some floating fancy of her own."

   1831, L[etitia] E[lizabeth] L[andon], chapter XIV, in Romance and Reality. […], volume II, London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, […], →OCLC, page 198

3. not comparableor by extension any segment or featurehuman sciencesPresent in the underlying phonological representation but not linked to an anchor on which it can surface.

   Historically, there was an accompanying vowel, but synchronically, a mere "floating" high tone is posited. In stage (b) this high tone causes the preceding low tone to raise to a raised-low tone via the process of low-raising. Finally, in stage (c) the floating high tone is lost.

   1974, Larry M. Hyman, Russell G. Schuh, “Universals of Tone Rules: Evidence from West Africa”, in Linguistic Inquiry, volume 5, number 1, →JSTOR, page 86

   1 more example

   Two classes of suffixes beginning with [+constricted glottis] ([+c.g.]) must be distinguished: those that invariably begin with a glottal stop and those that induce the glottalization of a preceding segment. Following Kim (2003), we attribute the difference to whether the suffix begins with a full glottal stop or a floating glottal “subsegment” (Zoll 1996). The essence of the distinction is that the full glottal stops consist underlyingly of a root node linked to a [+c.g.] feature while the subsegments consist solely of a [+c.g.] specification.

   2009 October 28, Eun-Sook Kim, Douglas Pulleyblank, “Glottalization and Lenition in Nuu-chah-nulth”, in Linguistic Inquiry, volume 40, number 4, →DOI, →ISSN, pages 567-617

1. gerundparticiplepresentpresent participle and gerund of float

plural floatings

1. The motion of something that floats.
2. in pluralMaterial that floats in a liquid.

   Plastic mud, brownish tinted, rich in floatings.

   1898, Journal of Microscopy, page 256

3. The spreading of plaster on the surface of walls.
4. biologyA veterinary dental procedure involving the filing down of sharp surfaces on a horse's teeth.