DictionaryAI

tiding

USTY-ding/ˈtaɪdɪŋ/

Pluraltidings

2 meanings of tiding

Practice

  1. 1
    nounarchaic
    News or fresh information, especially as brought or reported to someone.
    Glad tidings we bring / To you and your kin.
    19th century, “We Wish You a Merry Christmas”
    But yet it is pity we had lost tidings of our souls: actually we shall have to go in quest of them again, or worse in all ways will befall!
    1843, Thomas Carlyle, “Ch. 2, St. Edmundsbury”
    Note

    News named for what befalls: the word grows from Old English tīdung and Old Norse tíðindi, both tied to tīdan, "to befall; happen." It is almost always plural, and it now belongs to literary or deliberately old-fashioned prose. Tidings are brought, as in the King James Bible of 1611 ("bringest good tidings"), and in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (1813) days pass "without bringing any other tidings of him."

  2. 2
    verb
    Present participle and gerund of tide.

    The emergency fund was tiding them over between paychecks.

    Tiding the village over until the rains came required rationing every drop.

    Note

    Most at home in the phrase tide over, where something carries a person through a hard stretch: savings tiding a family over till payday. The same spelling serves the archaic word for news, but the two rarely collide. The verb usually takes an object (tiding them over), while the noun is almost always plural and literary. In harbor work, tiding means drifting in or out with the tide and anchoring when it turns, with no object at all.

tiding is a form of tide

tide, verb: (usually tide over, with the person helped placed before over) To help someone get through a period of difficulty or shortage. Full entry

Forms
tidetides he/she/ittiding -ing formtided past tense, past participle
Spelling
tide → tiding: drop the e, add -ing

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Origin

From Middle English tiding, from Late Old English tīdung, blended with forms like Middle English tidende that were connected to or influenced by Old Norse tíðindi ("news, tidings"); both link to Old English tīdan ("to befall, happen"). The cognates Dutch tijding and German Zeitung suggest inheritance from Proto-West Germanic *tīdungō. By surface analysis, it is tide ("time") + -ing.