Word.ws English Dictionary

tything

tything is the obsolete spelling of tithing.

Meaning of tithing

Noun

tithing (plural tithings)

  1. The tithe given as an offering to the church.
    • I prayed for the sick and saw some of them healed under my hands. I was given tithings of money and food by people who had not enough to eat themselves.1998, Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Talents, HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP (2019), page 294
  2. The payment of tithes.
  3. The collection of tithes.
  4. (dialectal) Ten sheaves of wheat (originally set up as such for the tithe proctor).
    • I see the boys of summer in their ruin / Lay the gold tithings barren, / Setting no store by harvest, freeze the soils1934, Dylan Thomas, “I see the boys of summer”, in 18 Poems, London: The Fortune Press
  5. (historical) A body of households (originally a tenth of a hundred or ten households) bound by frankpledge to collective responsibility and punishment for each other's behavior.
    Synonyms:
    tenmantale
  6. (historical) A part of the hundred as a rural division of territory.

Forms of tything

pluraltythings

Questions about tything

What is tything the obsolete spelling of?
Tything is the obsolete spelling of tithing.

Words near tything in the dictionary

  1. tythe
  2. tythed
  3. Tytherington
  4. Tytherington and Itchington
  5. tythes
  6. tything
  7. tything-man
  8. tythings
  9. tytonid
  10. tytonids
  11. Tytsjerksteradiel

Source and license

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