The action or an instance of making a buzzing, humming, or droning sound, esp. as a result of moving at speed; the action or an instance of moving with, or as if with, such a sound.
1892
Amid..the scraping and zooming of the instruments, string and reed.
‘Q’, I saw Three Ships i
1921
The drone of his father's voice came to him where he knelt, losing itself in the zooming of the bee.
S. Desmond, Gods i. 3
1945
The whole night was hideous with roarings and zoomings of planes landing and taking off.
D. Friend, Diary 7 February (2003) vol. II. 207
1981
We can hardly wait for..the zooming of the Roman candles that suddenly make the sky ablaze.
Kenosha (Wisconsin) News 1 July 10/1
2003
The zooming of cars can be heard throughout the city.
New York Times (Nexis) 25 May v. 12/1
2.
1917–
Aeronautics. The action of making a steep climb while flying at high speed. Cf. zoomv.1 2.
1917
‘Zooming’ is..frequently the only means of avoiding an obstacle when flying low.
Daily Mail 19 July 4/5
1971
Sudden halts, followed by more or less prolonged zooming, dives, loops.
Drama Reviewvol. 15 129
1999
If one neglects the dissipative effect of drag, zooming merely trades kinetic energy for potential energy.
Cinematography and Photography. The action of changing smoothly from a long shot with a lens, camera, etc., to a close-up or vice versa; the action of increasing or decreasing magnification of an image smoothly and quickly; cf. zoomv.1 3, 4. Frequently with in, out. Often attributive.
1934
By reason of the fact that our invention provides for universal focus, it is possible to have the feature of varying the size of the subject or object in the picture, i. e., what is known in the moving picture art as ‘zooming’.
U.S. Patent 1,955,850 6/1
1961
The zoom angle can be adjusted anywhere in the zooming range.
G. Millerson, Technique of Television Production iii. 34 (caption)
1974
Zooming in serves to pinpoint features of particular interest, while zooming out can establish the context of what may appear to be an isolated object.
Hist. Teachervol. 7 544
1989
Tasco 7–15×35 binoculars. Featuring zooming lever for smooth action.
Grattan Direct Catalogue Spring–Summer 898/1
2005
Zooming in reveals superb detail, which you'd expect from a camera with this many image sensors.
Digital Photographer No. 31. 105/1
2015
The Digital Crown, a device for zooming that compensated for the difficulty of pinching or spreading fingers on a tiny screen, was ordered up by the studio.
Some consonants can take the function of the vowel in unstressed syllables. Where necessary, a syllabic marker diacritic is used, hence /ˈpɛtl/ but /ˈpɛtl̩i/.
Vowels
iːfleece
ihappy
ɪkit
ɛdress
atrap, bath
ɑːstart, palm, bath
ɒlot
ɔːthought, force
ʌstrut
ʊfoot
uːgoose
əletter
əːnurse
ɪənear
ɛːsquare
ʊəcure
eɪface
ʌɪpride
aʊmouth
əʊgoat
ɔɪvoice
ãgratin
ɒ̃salon
ᵻ(/ɪ/-/ə/)
ᵿ(/ʊ/-/ə/)
Other symbols
The symbol ˈ at the beginning of a syllable indicates that that syllable is pronounced with primary stress.
The symbol ˌ at the beginning of a syllable indicates that that syllable is pronounced with secondary stress.
Round brackets ( ) in a transcription indicate that the symbol within the brackets is optional.
Some consonants can take the function of the vowel in unstressed syllables. Where necessary, a syllabic marker diacritic is used, hence /ˈpɛd(ə)l/ but /ˈpɛdl̩i/.
Vowels
ifleece, happy
ɪkit
ɛdress
ætrap, bath
ɑlot, palm, cloth, thought
ɑrstart
ɔcloth, thought
ɔrnorth, force
ʊfoot
ugoose
əstrut, comma
ərnurse, letter
ɪ(ə)rnear
ɛ(ə)rsquare
ʊ(ə)rcure
eɪface
aɪpride
aʊmouth
oʊgoat
ɔɪvoice
ɑ̃gratin
æ̃salon
ᵻ(/ɪ/-/ə/)
ᵿ(/ʊ/-/ə/)
Other symbols
The symbol ˈ at the beginning of a syllable indicates that that syllable is pronounced with primary stress.
The symbol ˌ at the beginning of a syllable indicates that that syllable is pronounced with secondary stress.
Round brackets ( ) in a transcription indicate that the symbol within the brackets is optional.
Simple text respell breaks words into syllables, separated by a hyphen. The syllable which carries the primary stress is written in capital letters. This key covers both British and U.S. English Simple Text Respell.
Consonants
b, d, f, h, k, l, m, n, p, r, s, t, v, w and z have their standard English values
gguy
jjay
yyore
chchore
khloch
shshore
ththaw
dhthee
zhbeige
Vowels
atrap
ahpalm
airsquare
arstart
arrcarry (British only)
awthought
ayface
a(ng)gratin
edress
eefleece
eerdeer
errmerry
ikit
ighpride
irrmirror
olot (British only)
ohgoat
oogoose
oorcure
orforce
orrsorry (British only)
owmouth
oyvoice
o(ng)salon
ustrut
uhletter
urnurse
urrhurry
uufoot
Frequency
zooming typically occurs about 0.02 times per million words in modern written English.
zooming is in frequency band 3, which contains words occurring between 0.01 and 0.1 times per million words in modern written English. More about OED's frequency bands
Frequency data is computed programmatically, and should be regarded as an estimate.
Frequency of zooming, n., 1910–2010
* Occurrences per million words in written English
Historical frequency series are derived from Google Books Ngrams (version 2), a data set based on the Google Books corpus of several million books printed in English between 1500 and 2010.
The overall frequency for a given word is calculated by summing frequencies for the main form of the word, any plural or inflected forms, and any major spelling variations.
For sets of homographs (distinct entries that share the same word-form, e.g. mole, n.¹, mole, n.², mole, n.³, etc.), we have estimated the frequency of each homograph entry as a fraction of the total Ngrams frequency for the word-form. This may result in inaccuracies.
Smoothing has been applied to series for lower-frequency words, using a moving-average algorithm. This reduces short-term fluctuations, which may be produced by variability in the content of the Google Books corpus.
Decade
Frequency per million words
1910
0.0044
1920
0.0048
1930
0.005
1940
0.0057
1950
0.0073
1960
0.011
1970
0.016
1980
0.021
1990
0.023
2000
0.027
2010
0.031
Frequency of zooming, n., 2017–2024
* Occurrences per million words in written English
Modern frequency series are derived from a corpus of 20 billion words, covering the period from 2017 to the present. The corpus is mainly compiled from online news sources, and covers all major varieties of World English.
Smoothing has been applied to series for lower-frequency words, using a moving-average algorithm. This reduces short-term fluctuations, which may be produced by variability in the content of the corpus.
Period
Frequency per million words
2017
0.028
2018
0.03
2019
0.03
2020
0.03
2021
0.028
2022
0.027
2023
0.025
2024
0.023
Originally published as part of the entry for zoom, v.¹