Word.ws English Dictionary

-in-waiting

-in-waiting suffix: depending on the expected arrival of a result, confirmation, etc.

Suffix

-in-waiting

  1. Depending on the expected arrival of a result, confirmation, etc.
    • Throughout her adolescence, authorities... commented that the young mother-in-waiting 'seem[ed] to have very, very high expectations of [her]self,' and... there was no failing to discern in them that slight unmistakable note of approval... and at any rate the future mother felt (for the moment)...1999, David Foster Wallace, “Suicide as a Sort of Present”, in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Little, Brown and Company
  2. About to happen; bound to happen.
    • Choosing such an unqualified person to operate the machine is an accident-in-waiting.
  3. Attendant to a royal figure.

Words formed from -in-waiting

Questions about -in-waiting

What does -in-waiting mean?
-in-waiting means depending on the expected arrival of a result, confirmation, etc.
What part of speech is -in-waiting?
-in-waiting is a suffix.

Words near -in-waiting in the dictionary

  1. -imundo
  2. -imus
  3. -in
  4. -in'
  5. -in-law
  6. -in-waiting
  7. -ina
  8. -inator
  9. -inda
  10. -ine
  11. -ing

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: -in-waiting (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “-in-waiting.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/-in-waiting. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.