sweeting

Pluralsweetings

1. 1
   nounobsolete

   A darling or sweetheart; an affectionate name for a loved one.

   Good night, my sweeting, and dream sweetly until morning.

   Trip no further, pretty sweeting.

   c. 1601, William Shakespeare, “Twelfe Night, or What You Will”

   Note

   Here the word is spoken to someone rather than about them. Shakespeare's Twelfth Night has "Trip no further, pretty sweeting", with a fond adjective leading in, much as one might say pretty darling. It is formed the same way as the apple name. Today it reads only as period color: it suits historical pastiche or a Shakespearean echo, and it sounds odd in ordinary speech.

2. 2
   nounobsolete

   A sweet-tasting variety of apple.

   Each sweeting was small, round, and remarkably sweet.

   Thy wit is a very Bitter-ſweeting, / It is a moſt ſharpe ſawce.

   c. 1591, William Shakespeare, “The Tragedie of Romeo and Ivliet”

   Note

   An apple named for its taste, built simply from sweet plus the suffix -ing. Roger Ascham's The Scholemaster sets it against the runnet, which a child refuses as green, hard and sour. Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet twists it into "bitter-sweeting", a sharp sauce of wit. The word belongs to older texts now; in modern writing, say sweet apple unless you want the period flavor.

3. 3
   verbarchaic

   Present participle and gerund of sweet. Archaic; the modern verb is sweeten.

   Note

   The -ing form of a verb that is itself archaic and poetic: sweet in the sense "to sweeten". In current English, sweetening does this work, so sweeting as a verb sounds deliberately old-fashioned. It shares its spelling with the apple name and the endearment, but only those nouns take a plural, sweetings.

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