• In politics, polling is the surveying of public opinion on an issue.
• In metallurgy, polling is the refining of a crude metal made impure by its own oxides.
• In telecommunication, the term polling can mean:
  1. Network control in which the control station invites tributary stations to transmit in the sequence specified by the control station,
  2. In point-to-point or multipoint communication, the process whereby stations are invited one at a time to transmit,
  3. In automated HF radio systems, a technique for measuring and reporting channel quality.
  4. The sequential interrogation of devices for various purposes, such as avoiding contention, determining operational status, or determining readiness to send or receive data. Computer science shares this definition of the word.
• In Computer science
  1. Actively sampling the status of an external device by a client program as a synchronous activity.
• In arboriculture, to trim a tree
• In agriculture, to cut off hair, horns etc of cattle

In its origin, the word comes from Middle Dutch polle, top of the head

References

• Federal Standard 1037C
• MIL-STD-188