Word.ws English Dictionary

toing and froing

toing and froing is the present participle and gerund of to and fro.

Meaning of to and fro

Verb

to and fro (third-person singular simple present tos and fros or to and fros, present participle toing and froing or to and froing, simple past and past participle toed and froed or to and froed)

  1. (idiomatic) To go back and forth; to alternate.
    • "For a while I didn't tell anyone on the ward where I was going, but my toing and froing made people curious and eventually I confided in a few."2015, Barbara Taylor, The Last Asylum: A Memoir of Madness in Our Times

See all 4 meanings of to and fro

Noun

toing and froing (uncountable)

  1. The process of moving back and forth or alternating.
    • Sitting back on a bench in the sunshine, Tom and I began to catch up with each other while the girls arranged their surprises at the remotest picnic table in the lay-by. Genial lorry drivers, munching wurst high in their cabs, looking down on their secretive toing and froing with interest.1987, Christina Hardyment, “Picking up Gold and Silver”, in Heidi’s Alp: One Family’s Search for Storybook Europe, Book Club edition, New York, N.Y.: The Atlantic Monthly Press, →OCLC, page 100
    • After an awful lot of toing and froing on the design front, these ships would be completed with a top speed of 18 knots, courtesy of 17,500 horsepower, a main belt of 11 inches thickness, or 280 millimeters, again of cemented Harvey nickel steel which was face-hardened, and the belt was beginning...2019 July 10, Drachinifel, 35:45 from the start, in French Pre-Dreadnoughts - When Hotels go to War, archived from the original on 24 Jan 2023

Questions about toing and froing

What does toing and froing mean?
Toing and froing means the process of moving back and forth or alternating.
What is toing and froing the present participle and gerund of?
Toing and froing is the present participle and gerund of to and fro.
What part of speech is toing and froing?
Toing and froing is a noun.

Words near toing and froing in the dictionary

  1. toilsome
  2. toilsomely
  3. toilsomeness
  4. toilworn
  5. toing
  6. toing and froing
  7. toings
  8. TOIs
  9. TOISA
  10. Toisanese
  11. TOISAs

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: toing and froing (page history and authors); to and fro (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: “toing and froing.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/toing_and_froing. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.