DATING

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does dating mean? 

• DATING (noun)
  The noun DATING has 1 sense:

1. use of chemical analysis to estimate the age of geological specimens

  Familiarity information: DATING used as a noun is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• DATING (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

Use of chemical analysis to estimate the age of geological specimens

Classified under:

Nouns denoting acts or actions

Synonyms:

dating; geological dating

Hypernyms ("dating" is a kind of...):

chemical analysis; qualitative analysis (the act of decomposing a substance into its constituent elements)

Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "dating"):

potassium-argon dating (geological dating that relies on the proportions of radioactive potassium in a rock sample and its decay product, argon)

carbon-14 dating; carbon dating; radiocarbon dating (a chemical analysis used to determine the age of organic materials based on their content of the radioisotope carbon 14; believed to be reliable up to 40,000 years)

rubidium-strontium dating (geological dating based on the proportions of radioactive rubidium into its decay product strontium; radioactive rubidium has a half-life of 47,000,000,000 years)

Derivation:

date (assign a date to; determine the (probable) date of)

 Context examples 

You may have heard something that surprised or shocked you concerning a person you are dating but not married to yet, as another house rules marriage.

(AstrologyZone.com, by Susan Miller)

However, the innovative dating techniques used in the study went a stage further, calculating how long the grains of quartz sediment that were dragged here by the early acequias have remained buried.

(Researchers demonstrate that Sierra Nevada is home to the oldest underground water recharge system in Europe, University of Granada)

An epoch of the Quaternary period dating from the end of the Pleistocene approximately 11,000 years ago until the present.

(Holocene epoch, NOAA Paleoclimate Glossary)

To obtain comprehensive geomorphic, sedimentological, biological and dating information, scientists deployed underwater sonar to map the sea floor and extracted fossil reef cores at 16 locations.

(Major study reveals Great Barrier Reef’s 30,000-year fight for survival, University of Granada)

While mammal backbones are specialized, the regions that underlie them were believed to be ancient, dating back to the earliest land animals.

(What makes a mammal a mammal? Our spine, say scientists, National Science Foundation)

The nearly-complete fossil, which researchers have named Ambopteryx longibranchium, was spotted in 2017, lying in a rock formation dating back 163 million years.

(Second Bat-Like Dinosaur Discovered in China, The Titi Tudorancea Bulletin)

Setting aside these entirely new forms of life, the plateau was very rich in known prehistoric forms, dating back in some cases to early Jurassic times.

(The Lost World, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

The second line of research has used radiocarbon dating to analyze the age at which 44 individuals died.

(The necropolis of El Barranquete in Níjar (Almería), proven to have been used for funerary rituals throughout the Bronze Age, University of Granada)

Scientists used ancient DNA analyses and carbon-14 dating to demonstrate the past existence of a unique population of Icelandic walrus that went extinct shortly after Norse settlement some 1,100 years ago.

(Extinction of Icelandic walrus coincides with Norse settlement, National Science Foundation)

So far as I can make out, it is nothing more exciting than an Abbey’s accounts dating from the second half of the fifteenth century.

(The Return of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)