Word.ws English Dictionary

heartening

heartening adjective: cheerfully encouraging. Also the present participle and gerund of hearten.

Adjective

heartening (comparative more heartening, superlative most heartening)

  1. Cheerfully encouraging.
    • All in all, 'Reticent Bodies' is a heartening discovery, and each subsequent reading will yield a quiet pleasure. Just as his work four years ago suggested, Surani is a writer striving to express his view of the world in his own way, and he’s finding his ‘tilt.’ Readers will anticipate more.2015, Alex Boyd, Ingrid Ruthig, “Review: Reticent Bodies”, in nprarchived, WordPress, archived from the original on 06 May 2016
    Antonyms:
    disheartening

Also used as

heartening is also the present participle and gerund of hearten.

Antonyms of heartening

Forms of heartening

comparativemore heartening
superlativemost heartening

Words formed from heartening

Questions about heartening

What does heartening mean?
Heartening means cheerfully encouraging.
What part of speech is heartening?
Heartening is an adjective.

Words near heartening in the dictionary

  1. heartened
  2. heartener
  3. hearteners
  4. heartenest
  5. hearteneth
  6. heartening
  7. hearteningly
  8. heartens
  9. heartes
  10. heartface
  11. heartfaces

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: heartening (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.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “heartening.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/heartening. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.