Besetting
adj, noun, verb ·3 syllables ·Uncommon ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 The act of one who besets or attacks.
"I might also here tell you of the contests and battles that such are engaged in, wherein they find the besettings of Satan, above any other of the saints."
- 1 present participle and gerund of beset form-of, gerund, participle, present
- 1 Deeply rooted; persistent.
"The first thing to bear in mind (especially if we ourselves belong to the clerico-academic-scientific type, the officially and conventionally “correct” type, “the deadly respectable” type, for which to ignore others is a besetting temptation) is that nothing can be more stupid than to bar out phenomena from our notice, merely because we are incapable of taking part in anything like them ourselves."
- 2 Obsessive
"Neither were they connected with fear: he was conscious of no fear. Rather, they originated in a strange besetting desire to know what to do when the time came; a desire gigantically disproportionate to the few swift moments to which it referred; a wondering that was more like the wondering of some other spirit within his, than his own."
Example
More examples"A young woman most penitently confessed to a friend of mine that an unholy desire to read women's magazines was her besetting 'temptation'."
Etymology
From beset + -ing.
More for "besetting"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.