forgiving

1. 1
   adjective

   Inclined to pardon faults and not hold a grudge against people who have done wrong.

   Like soft soil that takes a footprint and then smooths itself over.

   A forgiving parent overlooks the small rebellions of the teenage years.

   She proved remarkably forgiving, welcoming back the colleague who had betrayed her.

   Similarmerciful, lenient, tolerant, understanding, magnanimous

   Oppositevindictive, resentful, vengeful, merciless

2. 2
   adjective

   Designed so that errors are hard to make and easy to recover from, rarely causing serious harm.

   Like soft ground that cushions a fall instead of bruising you.

   The text editor is forgiving, restoring deleted paragraphs with a single keystroke.

   Engineers built a forgiving control panel that warns operators before any dangerous action.

   Similartolerant

   Oppositepunishing, harsh

   Note

   A designer's metaphor: the system behaves like the merciful sense, letting a user's slip pass without punishment. Roger S. Pressman's Software Engineering: A Practitioner's Approach (2010) pairs it with understandable and ties it to work saved continuously and an undo for any action. It names a quality of design rather than a mood, so it attaches to interfaces, tools and controls, not to the people using them.

3. 3
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of forgive.

   By forgiving his old rival, he finally let go of years of anger.

   She kept forgiving him long after others would have given up.

   Note

   Here the word is a verb, and it is easily mistaken for the adjective spelled the same way. As a verb it takes an object, as in forgiving a friend or forgiving a debt, since forgive can also mean waiving what is owed. It can also stand alone, as in a habit of forgiving. The adjective behaves differently: it grades (more forgiving, most forgiving) and describes a disposition rather than an act.

4. 4
   noununcountable

   An instance of pardoning a person for an offense or wrongdoing.

   Like tearing up an IOU instead of demanding payment.

   The community's forgiving of the offender astonished the visiting reporters.

   His forgiving of the betrayal came slowly, over many quiet months.

   Similarpardon, absolution

   Oppositecondemnation

   Note

   Unlike forgiveness, which names a state or quality, this noun counts single acts, so it can be plural. Bernard P. Dauenhauer's Citizenship in a Fragile World (1996) moves from your forgiveness to a group's promises and forgivings, setting the countable form beside promises as one more thing people do for one another. Where a plural is needed, forgivings supplies what forgiveness cannot.

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