seating

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

• noun The act of providing or furnishing with a seat or seats.
• noun The seats so provided or furnished.
• noun The arrangement of seats in a room, auditorium, or banquet hall.
• noun The member or part on or within which another part is seated.
• noun Material for upholstering seats.

from The Century Dictionary.

• noun In iron ship-building, a foundation or support built up of plates and angle-bars for the machinery in the interior of a vessel: as, an engine-seating; a boiler-seating.
• noun The act of placing on a seat; the act of furnishing with a seat or seats.
• noun Textile material made for upholstering the seats of chairs, sofas, and the like; especially, haircloth.
• noun plural In mech., collectively, the various fitted supports of the parts of a structure or of a machine.
• noun In ship-building, that part of the floor which rests on the keel.

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

• noun The act of providing with a seat or seats.
• noun The act of making seats; also, the material for making seats.

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

• noun uncountable The provision of chairs or other places for people to sit
• noun countable A period of time in which a restaurant will seat guests
• noun Material for making seats.
• noun A housing in which a component is seated.
• verb Present participle of seat.

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

• noun an area that includes places where several people can sit
• noun the service of ushering people to their seats