interleave

• interleaf

inter- +‎ leave

interleave (third-person singular simple present interleaves, present participle interleaving, simple past and past participle interleaved)

1. (transitive) To insert (pages, which are normally blank) between the pages of a book.
   • 1754, Samuel Johnson, Letter to the Rev. Mr. Thomas Warton, 28 November, 1754, cited in James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson, edited by Augustine Birrell, New York: Dodge, 1896, Volume 1, p. 225,

     Let a Servitor transcribe the quotations, and interleave them with references to save time. This will shorten the work and lessen the fatigue.

   • 1794, Robert Burns, Letter to Mr. James Johnson, Dumfries, 1794, in J. Logie Robertson (ed.), The Letters of Robert Burns, Selected and Arranged, with an Introduction, London: Walter Scott, 1887, p. 305,

     In the meantime, at your leisure, give a copy of the Museum to my worthy friend, Mr. Peter Hill, bookseller, to bind for me, interleaved with blank leaves, exactly as he did the Laird of Glenriddel’s, that I may insert every anecdote I can learn, together with my own criticisms and remarks on the songs.

   • 1916, James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Chapter 4,

     The raw morning air whetted his resolute piety; and often as he knelt among the few worshippers at the side-altar, following with his interleaved prayer-book the murmur of the priest, he glanced up for an instant towards the vested figure standing in the gloom between the two candles, which were the old and the new testaments, and imagined that he was kneeling at mass in the catacombs.

2. (transitive) To intersperse (something) at regular intervals between the parts of a thing or between items in a group.
   • 1889, Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Chapter 11,

     I had the demon’s own time with my armor, and this delayed me a little. It is troublesome to get into, and there is so much detail. First you wrap a layer or two of blanket around your body, […] then you put on your sleeves and shirt of chain mail— […] then you put on your shoes—flat-boats roofed over with interleaving bands of steel—and screw your clumsy spurs into the heels.

   • 1961, V. S. Naipaul, A House for Mr Biswas, Vintage International, 2001, Part One, Chapter 5,

     Then the Tulsi Store became a place of deep romance and endless delights, transformed from the austere emporium it was on other days, dark and silent, its shelves crammed with bolts of cloth that gave off acrid and sometimes unpleasant smells, its tables jumbled with cheap scissors and knives and spoons, towers of dusty blue-rimmed enamel plates interleaved with ragged grey paper, and boxes of hairpins, needles, pins and thread.

   • 2004, Lev Grossman, “An Offer You Can Refuse,” Time, 22 November, 2004,

     The Godfather Returns (Random House; 430 pages), by the non-Sicilian Mark Winegardner, is not precisely a sequel; it’s interleaved into the gaps between the three movies.

   • 2010, Alexandra Gill, “Restaurant review: Adesso Bistro,” The Globe and Mail, 7 July, 2010,

     […] Mr. Sylvestre shows just as much talent with charcuterie. His pork terrine […] interleaves succulent hunks of various meaty cuts between thick veins of milky lardo.

3. (computing, transitive) To allocate (things such as successive segments of memory) to different tasks.

• interleaved
• interleaving