shelving

adj

1. Sloping (as opposed to horizontally flat or vertically upright).

   “Her chamber is aloft, far from the ground, / And built so shelving that one cannot climb it / Without apparent hazard of his life.”

   “We still continued winding round Skiddaw, the sides of which are every where rather shelving, than steep.”

   “1858, George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life, Edinburgh: William Blackwood, Volume 2, “Janet’s Repentance,” Chapter 3, p. 87, her cheeks, which, on Whitsunday, loomed through a Turnerian haze of net-work, were, on Trinity Sunday, seen reposing in distinct red outline on her shelving bust, like the sun on a fog-bank”

   “The town of Abda is built upon the top and down the steeply shelving face of an isolated rocky spur,”

   “[…] a gently shelving plain led to a huge forest through which there were tracks that could safely be followed.”

verb

1. (form-of, gerund, participle, present)present participle and gerund of shelve

noun

1. (countable, uncountable)Shelves collectively.

   “a shelving unit”

   “There is ample shelving in the basement.”

2. (countable, in-plural, uncountable)The side-rails of a cart or waggon.

   “So, creaking and creaking, and the shelvins skirling under the weight of their load, they passed that danger point, the carts plodded into motion again […]”

3. (archaic, countable, uncountable)A sloping surface.

   “[…] the way was all along set so full of Snares, Traps, Gins, and Nets here, and so full of Pits, Pitfalls, deep holes and shelvings down there, that had it now been dark […] had he had a thousand souls, they had in reason been cast away;”

   “[The little room] had more corners in it than the brain of an obstinate man; was full of mad closets, into which nothing could be put that was not specially invented and made for that purpose; had mysterious shelvings and bulk-heads […]”

   “dry light sand, blown from higher shelvings, striped the dark wet edges of the shore”

   “Frau Von Zeck settled her powerful chins upon the coarse shelving of her Wagnerian breasts […]”