Word.ws English Dictionary

hastening

hastening is the present participle and gerund of hasten.

Meaning of hasten

Verb

hasten (third-person singular simple present hastens, present participle hastening, simple past and past participle hastened)

  1. (intransitive) To move or act in a quick fashion.
    Synonyms:
    dart
  2. (transitive) To make someone speed up or make something happen quicker.
    • I would hasten my escape from the windy storm.1611, The Holy Bible, […] (King James Version), London: […] Robert Barker, […], →OCLC, Psalms 55:8
    Synonyms:
    accelerate
  3. (transitive) To cause some scheduled event to happen earlier.
    • The decision to hasten completion of the electrification of London Midland Region main lines from Euston to the north and the subsequent diversion of some traffic to the Western Region in order to allow the engineers fuller track occupation, have focused attention on the two main routes between...1960 February, R. C. Riley, “The London-Birmingham services - Past, Present and Future”, in Trains Illustrated, page 96
    Synonyms:
    hurry

See all 4 meanings of hasten

Noun

hastening (plural hastenings)

  1. The act of speeding up; a growing faster.
    • Miss D. had found that regular blinking, or a loud-ticking watch, or horizontal lines or marks on the ground, etc., similarly served to pace her, and to prevent the incontinent hastenings and retardations which otherwise marred her ambulation.1973, Oliver Sacks, Awakenings
    • The secret seems to be a very precise control of the subtle slackenings and hastenings of tempo that are essential to Scriabin's idiom[…]1991, Christopher Pollard, The Good CD guide, 1992
    Synonyms:
    acceleration

Synonyms of hastening

Forms of hastening

pluralhastenings

Questions about hastening

What does hastening mean?
Hastening means the act of speeding up; a growing faster.
What is hastening the present participle and gerund of?
Hastening is the present participle and gerund of hasten.
What part of speech is hastening?
Hastening is a noun.
What is the plural of hastening?
The plural of hastening is hastenings.

Words near hastening in the dictionary

  1. hastened
  2. hastener
  3. hasteners
  4. hastenest
  5. hasteneth
  6. hastening
  7. hastenings
  8. hastens
  9. Hastert rule
  10. hastes
  11. hastest

Source and license

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