Word.ws English Dictionary

dismaying

dismaying is the present participle and gerund of dismay.

Meaning of dismay

Verb

dismay (third-person singular simple present dismays, present participle dismaying, simple past and past participle dismayed)

  1. To cause to feel apprehension; great sadness, or fear; to deprive of energy.
    • Be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed.1611, The Holy Bible, […] (King James Version), London: […] Robert Barker, […], →OCLC, Josh i:9
    Synonyms:
    daunt, appall, terrify
  2. To render lifeless; to subdue; to disquiet.
    • Do not dismay yourself for this.1596, Edmund Spenser, “Book IV, Canto I”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC, stanza 40
  3. To take dismay or fright; to be filled with dismay.
    • Dismay not, princes, at this accident,1591 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The First Part of Henry the Sixt”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward]...

See all 5 meanings of dismay

Adjective

dismaying (comparative more dismaying, superlative most dismaying)

  1. Disheartening; daunting.

Noun

dismaying (plural dismayings)

  1. (archaic) A state of dismay.
    • My dismayings utterly consume me: / They encompass me like water: / They press wholly upon me every day.quoted in 1842, John Mason Good, John Mason Neale, An Historical Outline of the Book of Psalms (page 186)

Forms of dismaying

Adjective
comparativemore dismaying
superlativemost dismaying
Noun
pluraldismayings

Words formed from dismaying

Questions about dismaying

What does dismaying mean?
Dismaying means disheartening; daunting.
What is dismaying the present participle and gerund of?
Dismaying is the present participle and gerund of dismay.
What part of speech is dismaying?
Dismaying can be an adjective or a noun.

Words near dismaying in the dictionary

  1. dismayedness
  2. dismayer
  3. dismayers
  4. dismayful
  5. dismayfully
  6. dismaying
  7. dismayingly
  8. dismayings
  9. dismays
  10. disme
  11. dismember

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: dismaying (page history and authors); dismay (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: “dismaying.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/dismaying. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.