Word.ws English Dictionary

whiling away

whiling away is the present participle and gerund of while away.

Meaning of while away

Verb

while away (third-person singular simple present whiles away, present participle whiling away, simple past and past participle whiled away)

  1. (transitive) To spend (time) idly but pleasantly.
    • Heaven knows what pains the author has been at, what bitter experiences he has endured and what heartache suffered, to give some chance reader a few hours' relaxation or to while away the tedium of a journey.1919, W[illiam] Somerset Maugham, chapter II, in The Moon and Sixpence, [New York, N.Y.]: Grosset & Dunlap Publishers […], →OCLC
    Synonyms:
    beguile
  2. (intransitive) To elapse, to pass.
    • The rest of the night hours whiled away for the prisoners as few slept.2010, Lori Davis, Second Wind, page 65

Questions about whiling away

What is whiling away the present participle and gerund of?
Whiling away is the present participle and gerund of while away.

Words near whiling away in the dictionary

  1. whiles
  2. whiles away
  3. whilest
  4. whilever
  5. whiling
  6. whiling away
  7. whilk
  8. whilks
  9. Whilkut
  10. Whilkuts
  11. whillaballoo

Source and license

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