Costning

noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    Temptation. UK, dialectal

Etymology

From Middle English costning, costnunge, from Old English costnung (“temptation, testing, trial, tribulation”), from Old English costnian, variant of Old English costian (“to tempt, try, prove, examine”), from Proto-Germanic *kustōną (“to try, taste”), from Proto-Indo-European *ǵews- (“to enjoy, taste”), equivalent to cost + -ing. Cognate with German kosten (“to taste”). Related to choose.

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.