Present participle of decorticate; the act of removing bark, husk, or cortex from something.
From decorticate + -ing (present participle suffix). The -ing form is one of the most productive verb forms in English, allowing any verb to describe ongoing action.
The -ing form is so common we rarely think about it, but it's incredibly useful—'decorticating' lets us turn an action into a noun phrase. Medieval monks decorticating seeds, surgeons decorticating tissue, scientists decorticating neurons all use the same linguistic structure, showing how English scales across domains.
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