0 present participle of ferret
1 to search for something by moving things around with your hands, especially in a drawer, bag, or other closed space:
For example, as police commissioner, with reporters at hand, he would stalk the roughest neighborhoods at night, ferreting out criminals and police laxity.
He showed the heuristic value of such mistakes, by describing the growth of mathematics as a process of systematically ferreting out mistakes in existing and new mathematical proofs and concepts.
Walsh's method throughout is characterised by a painstaking ferreting for the facts.
The only effective method of destroying rabbits is by gassing, and probably by ferreting.
We are not ferreting back into 1964 or even 1965.
No one goes ferreting in order to control the rabbit population.
The rest of my farm was dealt with by ferreting, and the rabbits have been kept under reasonable control by that means.
That is the worst kind of scaremongering—ferreting around for party political advantage in the sewer of politics.