misgiving
/mɪsˈɡɪvɪŋ/
misgiving noun: doubt, apprehension, a feeling of dread.
Noun
misgiving (countable and uncountable, plural misgivings)
- Doubt, apprehension, a feeling of dread
- He could think of her being there, without a lurking misgiving that it would have been better if she had not come.1846-1848, Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son
- In the night, or the gloomy chambers of the day, fears and misgivings wax strong, but out in the sunlight there is, for a time, cessation even of the terror of death.1900, Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie
- Synonyms:
- doubt, apprehension
misgiving meaning in Hindi, Tamil, Urdu and Malayalam
misgiving in Hindi
- misgiving, doubt, apprehension, suspicion
- अंदेशा andeśā
misgiving in Tamil
- அச்ச உணர்வு, நம்பிக்கை இன்மை, நம்பிக்கை இழப்பு
misgiving in Urdu
- اندیشہ, بدگمانی, چوک, ڈر, دھڑکا, خطرہ
misgiving in Malayalam
- Doubts, concerns
- ആശങ്ക āśaṅka
More languagesFewer languages
- misgiving in Kannada
- ಶಂಕೆ, ಸಂದೇಹ, ಅಳುಕು, ಅಪನಂಬಿಕೆ
Examples of misgiving in a sentence
- The rat must have been able to smell them on her fingers, and despite Zoe’s grave misgivings about the snack, which bore no relation to prawns or indeed cocktails, the rat didn’t seem to mind.2012, David Walliams [pseudonym; David Edward Williams], Ratburger, London: HarperCollins Children’s Books, →ISBN:
- Brunel's misgivings were proved prudent, tragically, in the 1879 failure of Thomas Bouch's Tay bridge (once a monument to cast iron, now a memorial to many lives lost).2025 March 5, Dr Joseph Brennan, “Remembering Brunel's timber viaducts”, in RAIL, number 1030, page 60:
Synonyms of misgiving
Forms of misgiving
| plural | misgivings |
|---|
Origin of misgiving
From misgive, from mis- + give, from Middle English give (“suggest, given”). Compare given and what gives.
Words formed from misgiving
Questions about misgiving
- What does misgiving mean?
- Misgiving means doubt, apprehension, a feeling of dread.
- What is misgiving in Hindi?
- Misgiving in Hindi is अंदेशा (andeśā). See Misgiving meaning in Hindi.
- How do you use misgiving in a sentence?
- The rat must have been able to smell them on her fingers, and despite Zoe’s grave misgivings about the snack, which bore no relation to prawns or indeed cocktails, the rat didn’t seem to mind.
- What part of speech is misgiving?
- Misgiving is a noun.
- How do you pronounce misgiving?
- Misgiving is pronounced /mɪsˈɡɪvɪŋ/.
- What is the plural of misgiving?
- The plural of misgiving is misgivings.
Words near misgiving in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: misgiving (page history and authors); अंदेशा (Hindi) (page history and authors); misgiving (Tamil Wiktionary) (page history and authors); misgiving (Urdu Wiktionary) (page history and authors); misgiving (Kannada Wiktionary) (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-misgiving.wav.
Cite this entry: “misgiving.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/misgiving. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.