Word of the Day:
yearning
What It Means
A wistful or melancholy longing.
She had a yearning to see her long-lost sister again.
Yearning in Context
“Mrs. MacClarty then took down a bottle of rennet, or yearning, as she called it.”
Did You Know?
From Middle English yerning, from Old English ġierning, ġierninge. Equivalent to the gerund (yearn + -ing). yearn comes from Proto-West Germanic *girnijan, from Proto-Germanic *girnijaną, from *gernaz (“eager, willing”) + *-janą, from Proto-Indo-European *gʰer- (“to yearn for”). By surface analysis, yearn + -ing.
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: yearning (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the word and reformatted its meaning, examples and origin.
Cite this entry: “yearning.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/yearning. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.