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PlainSpell

reefing

noun, verb

reefing is a noun meaning “The process of reefing (taking in a sail); an act of reefing; also used of clothing” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled R-E-E-F-I-N-G, and it appears about once in every 18 million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data). The plural of reefing is reefings.

What does reefing mean?

noun

  1. 1

    The process of reefing (taking in a sail); an act of reefing; also used of clothing.

  2. 2

    AustraliaA reef (seam of quartz).

verb

  1. 1

    present participle and gerund of reef (a form of reef)

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How do you pronounce reefing?

  • Australia

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: En-au-reefing.ogg, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).

Forms of reefing

  • reefings plural

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How common is reefing?

Reefing appears about once in every 18 million words in written English, the 128,787th most frequent word form in the list.

Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).