layup

noun

Etymology: From lay + up.

1. A close-range shot in which the shooter banks the ball off the backboard from a few feet away.

   “Rockledge's Shanikqua Smith goes for a layup during Tuesday's game against Titusville.”

2. A relatively easy task.

   “Meeting the numbers will be a layup, if not a slam dunk.”

3. The state of being laid up.

   “The ship endured an interminable layup in the harbor lasting nearly a month.”

4. A track used to store train cars.

   “The caboose, long decrepit, rested on a forgotten layup just north of the dry riverbed.”

   “The City Hall station on the BMT line [...] has a lower level that was never put into service. Yet the platforms have been maintained, are well illuminated, and serve as a layup and storage area for the MTA.”

5. A train car sitting in storage (laid up), often overnight.

   “Though I knew we shouldn't be there, she pulled me out of the tunnel and into the dark layup, its floors still grubby from the morning commute many hours ago.”

   “A nonmoving empty train, or a layup, was easiest to pin down at night or on weekends when trains would park on the dormant stretches of express tracks.”

6. The process of applying alternate layers of a material and a binding agent to form a composite material.

   “Forgetting to clear the sawdust around his workshop, Payton ended up contaminating the resin-ply matrix with wood particles during his hand layup.”

   “In addition to employing flax fibres for polymer-coated sutures, more recently, flax fibres have been proposed for reinforcing polymer composites, such as hand layup laminated scaffolds in tissue engineering.”