Chippings are small, rough pieces of stone, spread on purpose when people put a new hard surface on a road or a railway track. They lock together and give tyres or train wheels something to grip. You also see them on garden paths and driveways. The word is almost always plural: we say chippings, not a chipping, when we mean this building material. It is a practical, outdoor, slightly technical word — the sort you hear from road workers or read on a bag at a garden shop — not a word for food. Though actually, a chipping can in other talk mean any small chip of wood or stone; the road-and-rail sense is the one that has become a stuff-name of its own.