Yearning
noun, verb ·Moderate ·College level
Definitions
- 1 A wistful or melancholy longing.
"She had a yearning to see her long-lost sister again."
- 2 Rennet (an enzyme to curdle milk in order to make cheese). Scotland, archaic, countable, uncountable
- 3 prolonged unfulfilled desire or need wordnet
- 1 present participle and gerund of yearn form-of, gerund, participle, present
"I've got this burning, yearning, yearning / Feeling inside me / Ooh, deep inside me / And it hurts so bad"
Example
More examples"He thought of them yearning for fame."
Etymology
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.
PIE word *ḱóm From earlier yerning, from Middle English yernyng, erning, renning. From Old English rynning and gerunnen, geurnen (“run together, coagulated, curdled”), past participles of gerinnan, geirnan, respectively. Influenced by Middle English yern (“to (cause to) coagulate or curdle”), Old English iernan (“to run, flow”), metathesized forms derived from the same origin. From verbal prefix ge- + rinnan (“to run”). First element is from Proto-West Germanic *ga-, from Proto-Germanic *ga-, from Proto-Indo-European *ḱóm (“with, by”); second element is from Proto-Germanic *rinnaną, from Proto-Indo-European *h₃r̥-néw-ti, from *h₃er- (“to move”). Doublet of rennet, run.
More for "yearning"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.