Tithing
noun, verb ·Uncommon ·College level
Definitions
- 1 A tithe or tenth in its various senses, (particularly):; 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."
- 2 A tithe or tenth in its various senses, (particularly):; The payment of tithes.
- 3 A tithe or tenth in its various senses, (particularly):; The collection of tithes.
- 4 Ten sheaves of wheat (originally set up as such for the tithe proctor). dialectal
"I see the boys of summer in their ruin / Lay the gold tithings barren, / Setting no store by harvest, freeze the soils"
- 5 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. historical
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- 6 A part of the hundred as a rural division of territory. historical
- 1 present participle and gerund of tithe form-of, gerund, participle, present
Example
More examples"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."
Etymology
From Middle English tithyng, from Old English tēoþung or tēoðung, from tēoða (“a tithe”) + -ing (suffix forming patronymics and diminutives) and tēoþian (“to tithe”) + -ung (suffix forming verbal nouns). Equivalent to tithe + -ing.
Related phrases
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.