tapping

Etymology

noun

1. An act of making a light hit or strike against something.
   She has rapid and powerful footwork, but she doesn’t wow you with any special trills or woodpecker tappings. June 26, 2009, Alastair Macaulay, “Leading the Audience Into Flamenco’s Heart”, in New York Times
2. (music) A guitar technique in which the strings are tapped against the fingerboard
3. The process by which a resource is tapped or exploited.
   Competitive tappings of a common oil pool can lead only to waste and overproduction, unless rigidly regulated […] 1938, Paul Burke Jacobs, Harry Paul Newton, Motor Fuels from Farm Products, page 99
4. (electrical engineering) A connection made to some point between the end terminals of a transformer coil or other component.
   The essential feature is that two adjacent transformer tappings are connected to the load simultaneously, each connection having a self-excited transductor in series; …. 1962 June, “Talking of Trains: Notable new locomotives”, in Modern Railways, page 373

verb

1. present participle and gerund of tap