missing

/ˈmɪsɪŋ/

missing is the present participle and gerund of miss.

Adjective

missing (not comparable)

Not able to be located; gone, misplaced.
- my missing socks
- Forty three killed and 80 wounded in action with the Implacable. 180 killed and miſſing in action with the Centaur.1808 October 1, “State of Public Affairs in September. Containing Official Papers and Authentic Documents. [Killed and Wounded on Board the Emperor of Russia’s Late Ship of War Sevolod.]”, in The...
Synonyms:

absent, lost, lacking
Not present when it (they) should be.
- missing data point
- Joe went missing last year. He had all teeth missing when he was finally found.
Of an internal combustion engine: running roughly due to an occasional lack of a spark or other irregular fault.

miss (third-person singular simple present misses, present participle missing, simple past and past participle missed)

(ambitransitive, physical) To fail to hit, catch, grasp, etc.
- I fired the gun, but the bullet missed the target.
(ambitransitive, physical) To avoid hitting.
- The driver swerved and just managed to miss the chicken crossing the road.
(transitive) To fail to achieve or attain.
- The company missed all its sales targets.
(transitive) To fail to experience, attend, partake, take advantage of, etc.
- Joe missed the meeting this morning.
(transitive) To avoid or escape.
- The car just missed hitting a passer-by.
(transitive) To become aware of the loss or absence of; to feel the want or need of, sometimes with regret; to feel sadness at the absence of somebody or something.
- I miss you! Come home soon!

missing (plural missings)

A value that is missing.
- The treatment of missings is a problem in statistical software.1997, S. Klinke, Data Structures for Computational Statistics, page 27
- Patterns of missings across the whole data set are readily visible, but also patterns which only apply to small subgroups of cases.2002, David J. Hand, Niall M. Adams, Richard J. Bolton, Pattern Detection and Discovery

plural	missings

By surface analysis, miss + -ing.

What does missing mean?: Missing means not able to be located; gone, misplaced.
What is missing the present participle and gerund of?: Missing is the present participle and gerund of miss.
What part of speech is missing?: Missing can be an adjective or a noun.
How do you pronounce missing?: Missing is pronounced /ˈmɪsɪŋ/.

Adapted from Wiktionary: missing (page history and authors); miss (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: 2026-09-02

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-us-missing.ogg.

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