Word.ws English Dictionary

gerning

gerning is the present participle and gerund of gern.

Meaning of gern

Verb

gern (third-person singular simple present gerns, present participle gerning, simple past and past participle gerned)

  1. (obsolete) To grin.
  2. (obsolete) To yawn.
    • [He] gaped like a gulfe, when he did gerne, / That whether man or monster one could scarse discerne1596, Edmund Spenser, “Book V, Canto XII”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC, stanza 13

Questions about gerning

What is gerning the present participle and gerund of?
Gerning is the present participle and gerund of gern.

Words near gerning in the dictionary

  1. gerned
  2. Gerner
  3. Gerners
  4. Gernert
  5. Gernerts
  6. gerning
  7. gerns
  8. Gernsbackian
  9. Gernsheim
  10. Gero
  11. gero-

Source and license

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