envying

Pluralenvyings

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of envy.

   He was quietly envying his neighbor's promotion while congratulating him at the party.

   Envying other people's success rarely makes anyone more successful.

   Note

   Here the y of envy stays put, since -ing never changes it. The form builds the progressive after be and also names the act on its own. Either way it takes a direct object, the person (envying her cousin) or what they have (envying his freedom), and the two can be combined with no preposition: envying a friend her calm.

2. 2
   nouncountable or uncountable

   A feeling of envy, or a single instance of it.

   The family business never recovered from the petty envyings between the two brothers.

   She noticed a sharp envying in herself each time the neighbors' new car pulled into the driveway.

   Similarjealousy, resentment

   Note

   A countable noun that lives mostly in the plural, naming the separate fits of envy that make up a resentful life, and it keeps company with harsh adjectives. Edmund Law in 1737 writes of "bitter envyings" among ambitious worldlings; Letitia Elizabeth Landon a century later of an existence "filled with mean envyings". It belongs to moral and literary prose; in ordinary talk, envy does the work.

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