caring

1. 1
   adjective

   Showing kindness, sensitivity, and concern for the feelings and needs of others.

   Like a warm blanket of attention wrapped around someone who is hurting.

   The hospice was staffed by caring volunteers who sat with the dying.

   Former students remember him as a caring mentor who never gave up on anyone.

   Similarkind, compassionate, kindhearted, considerate, warm

   Oppositeuncaring, callous, unkind

   Note

   An adjective grown out of the verb, and its grammar shows the change. It takes very and compares as more caring and most caring, which the verb form cannot do. That gives an easy test: a very caring person is kind by nature, while someone caring for a patient is simply doing the verb. It is said of people, such as a caring mentor or caring volunteers.

2. 2
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of care.

   He spent years caring for patients in a crowded hospital ward.

   Caring for a newborn left them exhausted but happy.

   Note

   Every sense of care passes through this form, and the preposition after it usually decides which one is meant. Caring for someone is looking after them; caring about something is being concerned with it. With be it builds the progressive (she is caring for her father). Without it, the form works as a verbal noun that can stand as a subject: caring for a newborn is exhausting.

3. 3
   noununcountable

   The act or practice of looking after others and attending to their needs.

   Like a steady hand that holds yours through every hard day.

   The quiet caring of the volunteers went largely unnoticed.

   Her lifetime of caring for others earned the community's deep respect.

   Similarcare, caregiving

   Note

   The noun can be counted, and its plural makes a pointed partner for curings. Thomas Stephen Szasz's The Myth of Psychotherapy (1988) uses the pair to set medical treatment against spiritual attention, as both "medical curings and spiritual carings." In the plural it names separate acts of care rather than a general disposition, and it is most at home in deliberate, rhetorical prose like this.

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