blocking

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blocking

1. present participle and gerund of block

blocking (countable and uncountable, plural blockings)

1. The act by which something is blocked; an obstruction.

   blocking of major opposition sites

   • 1973, Oliver Sacks, Awakenings:

     Miss H.'s voice was clear and intelligible, although it alternated between vocal blockings and extreme vocal hurry, every clause being jetted out suddenly, and rapidly decaying into aphonia.

2. The precise movement and positioning of actors in order to facilitate a performance (originally planned using miniature blocks).
3. Blocks used to support (a building, etc.) temporarily.
4. (computing) A feature that prevents a keyboard from registering multiple simultaneous keypresses that would cause ghosting.
   • 2011, John St. Clair, Project Arcade: Build Your Own Arcade Machine, page 218:

     Examine your matrix map, and make sure that no three keystrokes form a rectangle with a fourth keystroke that will cause you problems. This prevents both ghosting and blocking.

5. (signal processing) A rectangular discontinuity as an artifact of separating a discrete signal into blocks that are processed individually.
   • 2017, Sekine Asadi Amiri, Hamid Hassanpour, Image compression using JPEG with reduced blocking effects via adaptive down-sampling and self-learning image sparse representation, →DOI, page 1:

     Blocking is an annoying effect in image compression using JPEG especially at low bit-rates.

• gin block