yearning
Pluralyearnings
Pluralyearnings
- 1A longing that is wistful or touched with sadness.
Her letters from abroad are full of a quiet yearning for home.
Years in the city had left him with a yearning to live by the sea.
Similarlonging, desire, hankering, ache
Note
The noun goes back to Old English ġierning, the gerund of yearn, whose Germanic root meant "eager, willing." The eagerness has softened into wistfulness, but the grammar has held: a yearning is for something (a yearning for home) or to do something (a yearning to live by the sea), and it often takes a gentle adjective such as quiet.
- 2Present participle and gerund of yearn.
Yearning for a simpler life, they sold the house and moved to the country.
The cello line keeps yearning upward before it finally comes to rest.
Note
Music can do the yearning as well as people: a cello line keeps yearning upward, and a singer can be yearning out a phrase, where out marks the performance. An older use, now dated, directs the feeling at a person, in affection or sympathy rather than desire, so in older prose a heart that is yearning may be tender rather than wanting.
- 3Rennet, the enzyme used to curdle milk when making cheese.
Her grandmother kept a jar of yearning in the cool of the dairy for cheesemaking.
A few drops of yearning set the warm milk into curds by morning.
Note
The cheesemaker's word only looks like the feeling. It comes from Old English words meaning "run together, curdled," past participles of gerinnan, which describe what the milk does; Middle English wrote it yernyng, erning or renning before it came to share a spelling with the wistful longing. It is archaic and Scottish, and elsewhere the word is rennet.
Showing meanings only.
yearning is a form of yearn
yearn, verb: To have a strong desire or longing for something, often something absent, lost, or belonging to the past, or to want very much to do something. Full entry
- Spelling
- yearn → yearning: add -ing
Use it in a sentence
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Origins
From Middle English yerning, from Old English ġierning (also ġierninge), the gerund of yearn (yearn + -ing). Yearn itself comes from Proto-West Germanic *girnijan, from Proto-Germanic *girnijaną, built on *gernaz (“eager, willing”), from Proto-Indo-European *gʰer- (“to yearn for”).
From earlier yerning, from Middle English yernyng (also erning, renning), from Old English rynning and from gerunnen and geurnen (“run together, coagulated, curdled”), the past participles of gerinnan and geirnan; it was influenced by Middle English yern (“to (cause to) coagulate or curdle”) and Old English iernan (“to run, flow”). The Old English verbs combine the prefix ge- (from Proto-Germanic *ga-, from Proto-Indo-European *ḱóm, “with, by”) with rinnan (“to run”, from Proto-Germanic *rinnaną, ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *h₃er-, “to move”). It is a doublet of rennet and run.