Word.ws English Dictionary

haggling

haggling is the present participle and gerund of haggle.

Meaning of haggle

Verb

haggle (third-person singular simple present haggles, present participle haggling, simple past and past participle haggled)

  1. (intransitive) To argue for a better deal, especially over prices between a buyer and seller.
    • I haggled for a better price because the original price was too high.
    Synonyms:
    bargain, chaffer
  2. (transitive) To hack (cut crudely)
    • Suffolk first died, and York, all haggled o'er, / Comes to him, where in gore he lay insteeped.1599 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Life of Henry the Fift”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount...
  3. To stick at small matters; to chaffer; to higgle.
    • June 30, 1784, Horace Walpole, letter to the Hon. Henry Seymour Conway
      Royalty and science never haggled about the value of blood.

Noun

haggling (plural hagglings)

  1. The act of one who haggles.
    • All the materials, therefore, existed for an interminable series of hagglings, bargainings, and blackmailings.1934, Winston Churchill, Marlborough: His Life and Times (book 2, page 51)
    • After weeks of haggling, Transport for London and the Department for Transport agreed a £200 million short-term funding deal that will keep the network running until June.2022 March 23, Paul Clifton, “Londoners pay the price”, in RAIL, number 953, page 48

Forms of haggling

pluralhagglings

Questions about haggling

What does haggling mean?
Haggling means the act of one who haggles.
What is haggling the present participle and gerund of?
Haggling is the present participle and gerund of haggle.
What part of speech is haggling?
Haggling is a noun.
What is the plural of haggling?
The plural of haggling is hagglings.

Words near haggling in the dictionary

  1. haggle
  2. haggled
  3. haggler
  4. hagglers
  5. haggles
  6. haggling
  7. hagglings
  8. haggly
  9. haggravate
  10. haggravated
  11. haggravates

Source and license

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