regretting

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of regret.

   By midnight she was regretting every line of the email she had sent.

   Regretting the missed opportunity, he applied again the following year.

   Note

   The -ing form of regret, with the final t doubled: regret, regretting. It builds the progressive (she was regretting the email) and opens participle clauses (Regretting the missed opportunity, he applied again). As a gerund it names the activity itself, which shades into the countable noun. It carries every sense of the verb, including the archaic one of missing or mourning what is gone.

2. 2
   noununcountable

   The act of feeling sorrow or disappointment about something done or left undone.

   His quiet regretting of the wasted years showed in everything he did.

   No amount of regretting will undo the damage already done.

   Similarremorse, sorrow, repentance

   Note

   A noun for the act rather than the feeling: where regret names the pain, regretting names the going-over of it, again and again. It can even be counted. Thomas Hardy's The Peace-Offering (1917) puts the plural to work in "the regrettings infinite" that flit through the mind at night. In ordinary prose, regret or regrets is the usual choice, and regrettings has a poet's coloring.

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