A continuing patent application is a patent application which follows an "original" patent application.
In United States patent law for instance, a continuing patent application may be a continuation, divisional, or continuation-in-part application. Those are three special types of patent applications.
Continuation
A "continuation application" is a patent application filed by an applicant who wants to pursue additional claims to an invention disclosed in an earlier application of the applicant (the "parent" application) that has not yet been issued or abandoned. The continuation uses the same specification as the pending parent application, claims filing date priority of the parent, and must name at least one of the same inventors as in the parent. This type of application is useful when a patent examiner has allowed some but rejected other claims in an application, or where an applicant may not have exhausted all useful ways of claiming different embodiments of the invention.
Divisional
This is unlike a "divisional application" (which also claims filing date priority from the parent) because a divisional application claims a distinct or independent invention based upon pertinent parts "carved out" of the parent application's specification. A divisional application need not name any inventors named in the parent. This type of application is often the result of a "restriction requirement" by an examiner, because a patent can only claim a single invention.
Continuation-in-part
Furthermore, a "continuation-in-part" application (or "CIP" or "CIP application"), claiming filing date priority from a parent application, is one in which the applicant adds matter not disclosed in the parent, but repeats some substantial portion of the parent's specification, and has at least one common inventor as named in the parent application. This is a convenient way to claim enhancements developed after the parent application was filed.
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