gathering

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

• noun The action of one that gathers.
• noun That which is gathered or amassed; a collection or accumulation.
• noun An assembly of persons; a meeting.
• noun The collecting of food that grows wild, such as berries, roots, and grains.
• noun A gather in cloth.
• noun A suppurated swelling; a boil or abscess.

from The Century Dictionary.

• noun The act of assembling, collecting, or making a collection, as of money.
• noun That which is gathered together.
• noun A crowd; an assembly; specifically, a concourse of spectators or participants for some purpose of common interest.
• noun A collection or assemblage of anything; a contribution.
• noun An inflamed and suppurating swelling.
• noun A wooden construction about a scuttle in a roof.
• noun In building, a contraction of any passage, as of a drain, or of a fireplace at its junction with the flue.
• noun The act of making gathers, or of giving shape to a garment, as a skirt, by means of gathers.
• noun In glass manufacturing, the act of coiling or collecting a mass of molten glass in the viscous state on the end of a rod or tube.
• noun The collection in proper order of the folded sections, plates, or maps of an unbound book or pamphlet.
• noun In agriculture, plowing back and forth around the crown of an existing ridge of land, thus turning all the furrow-slices inward and increasing the height of the ridge.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

• noun The act of collecting or bringing together.
• noun That which is gathered, collected, or brought together.
• noun A crowd; an assembly; a congregation.
• noun A charitable contribution; a collection.
• noun A tumor or boil suppurated or maturated; an abscess.
• adjective Assembling; collecting; used for gathering or concentrating.
• adjective (Bookbinding) a table or board on which signatures are gathered or assembled, to form a book.
• adjective a lighted coal left smothered in embers over night, about which kindling wood is gathered in the morning.
• adjective a hoop used by coopers to draw together the ends of barrel staves, to allow the hoops to be slipped over them.
• adjective In Scotland, a fiery peat which was sent round by the Borderers as an alarm signal, as the fiery cross was by the Highlanders.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

• noun A meeting or get-together; a party or social function.
• noun A group of people or things.
• noun bookbinding A section, a group of bifolios, or sheets of paper, stacked together and folded in half.
• verb present continuous of gather; collecting or bringing together

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

• noun the social act of assembling
• noun sewing consisting of small folds or puckers made by pulling tight a thread in a line of stitching
• noun a group of persons together in one place
• noun the act of gathering something