The word "combing" is correct and usable in written English.
It is a verb meaning "to brush or arrange the hair with a comb." For example, "She spent a few minutes combing her hair before she left for work."
For the past couple of weeks, Osborne and his new chief secretary, Greg Hands, have been combing through Whitehall looking for savings the Treasury can make.
From the carefree girl combing her hair, to the man proudly holding a crocodile destined for a new life as a handbag, to the child soldier, the photos showed a country that is complex and in many ways troubled, but culturally rich, and full of life.
The FSD team ended up studying the group's military doctrine and combing media reports for any mention of positions defended by the Tigers to help work out where landmines might be.Now such surveys can get help from a free service offered by the European Space Agency.
By the end of the year, Mr Blix expects to have around 100 inspectors from more than 40 countries combing Iraq.They will be given immediate and unrestricted access to any sites they wish to see, Iraq's deputy prime minister, Tariq Aziz, promised at the weekend.
The American-led inspectors who have been combing Iraq since the war have found materials, documents and evidence of research programmes that should have been handed over to the UN.
And music industry insiders, who once might have ignored bands playing the basement-show circuit, are combing the blogs, SoundCloud and of course YouTube looking for the next sensation.
However, combing of the data it collected in its first incarnation continues, and Douglas Caldwell of the SETI Institute, in Mountain View, California, who is one of the mission's chief scientists, announced to the meeting the discovery of eight new planets.
Earlier this year, the 8,500 programmers in the company's Windows division were given new security training, after which they spent two months combing their code for potential vulnerabilities.
But new mathematical techniques being developed to handle "massive data sets"—collections of information whose size is measured in millions of gigabytes might soon provide an answer, by combing through billions of telephone records.The records in question are held by AT&T, which keeps track of the billing information for roughly 250m phone calls each day.
The paddy-fields were brown and denuded, flecked with elegant white birds combing for paddies and small fish.At Nambol, 10km south of the capital, we made a brief stop at the foot of a sudden, steep hillock where a rusting field-gun and small white stupa remembered 55,000 Japanese war-casualties.
A team of 140 consultants from A.T. Kearney and EDS is combing through the main Rolls-Royce engine factory in Derby, trying to squeeze out yet more cost.
