Word.ws English Dictionary

pitying

pitying is the present participle and gerund of pity.

Noun

pitying (plural pityings)

  1. The act of one who pities.
    • Oh! the unspeakable privilege to have Him for our Father, who is the Father of mercies and compassions, and those not barren, fruitless pityings, for He is withal the God of all consolations.1849, Robert Leighton (Archbishop of Glasgow), A practical commentary upon the first Epistle of St. Peter (page 47)
  2. (collective, rare) A flock of doves.
    • Settle in their cleanness/a pitying of doves who know hawkfear1975, Aeschylus, translated by Janet Lembke, The Suppliants, Oxford University Press
    • If you want to represent a smaller swam, such as a pitying of doves, substitute the following statistics...2006, Tome of Magic, Wizards of the Coast

Meaning of pity

Verb

pity (third-person singular simple present pities, present participle pitying, simple past and past participle pitied)

  1. (transitive) To feel pity for (someone or something).
    • You have got to pity the guy - he lost his wife, mother and job in the same month.
  2. (transitive) To feel contempt for someone who is hopelessly inferior.
  3. (regional, transitive) To make (someone) feel pity; to provoke the sympathy or compassion of.
    • She lenger yet is like captiv'd to bee; / That even to thinke thereof it inly pitties mee.1596, Edmund Spenser, “Book IV, Canto XI”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC

See all 7 meanings of pity

Synonyms of pitying

Antonyms

Forms of pitying

pluralpityings

Questions about pitying

What does pitying mean?
Pitying means the act of one who pities.
What is pitying the present participle and gerund of?
Pitying is the present participle and gerund of pity.
What part of speech is pitying?
Pitying is a noun.
What is the plural of pitying?
The plural of pitying is pityings.

Words near pitying in the dictionary

  1. pity pot
  2. pity pots
  3. pity potties
  4. pity potty
  5. pityful
  6. pitying
  7. pityingly
  8. pityings
  9. pityless
  10. pitylessly
  11. pitylessness

Source and license

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