Word.ws English Dictionary

comparing and despairing

comparing and despairing is the present participle and gerund of compare and despair.

Meaning of compare and despair

Verb

compare and despair (third-person singular simple present compares and despairs, present participle comparing and despairing, simple past and past participle compared and despaired)

  1. To distress oneself by comparing one's own situation with that of others who seem more successful.
    • We are now on a path, a pilgrimage, a journey, an adventure, and we must now begin to pay more attention. Look at the signs guiding you, look at those who ambush you, even the weather of your own moods defines whether you succeed or not. One of the other damaging evils we do to ourselves is compare...2011, C. Stephen Foster, Awakening the Actor Within

Questions about comparing and despairing

What is comparing and despairing the present participle and gerund of?
Comparing and despairing is the present participle and gerund of compare and despair.

Words near comparing and despairing in the dictionary

  1. comparest
  2. compareth
  3. comparibility
  4. comparing
  5. comparing and contrasting
  6. comparing and despairing
  7. comparing apples to apples
  8. comparing apples with apples
  9. comparing notes
  10. comparingly
  11. comparision

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: comparing and despairing (page history and authors); compare and despair (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: “comparing and despairing.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/comparing_and_despairing. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.