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Allin

acting

adjectiveverbnouncommon in dialogue

  • //ˈæk.tɪŋ//

Temporarily assuming the duties or authority of another person when they are unable to do their job.

adjective

  1. 1

    Temporarily assuming the duties or authority of another person when they are unable to do their job.

    The Acting Minister must sign Executive Council documents in a Minister's absence.

    The CEO is currently in a hospital. The CFO is acting CEO in the meantime.

    Amy Gleason is the acting administrator of the US DOGE Service, the agency that houses the temporary Department of Government Efficiency, a White House official told CNN on Tuesday.

Etymology

Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *h₂eǵ- Proto-Indo-European *-eti Proto-Indo-European *h₂éǵeti Proto-Italic *agō Latin agō Latin ācta Old French actbor. Middle English acte English act English -ing English acting From act + -ing.

verb

  1. 1

    Also a form of actpresent participle and gerund of act

    For quotations using this term, see Citations:acting.

noun

  1. 1

    archaicAn action or deed.

    […] he does so much magnifie Nature and her Actings in all this material World, as he gives just cause of suspicion that he hath made her a kind of joynt Deess with God in the Affairs thereof;

    […] I desire this Account may pass with them, rather for a Direction to themselves to act by, than a History of my actings, seeing it may not be of one farthing value to them to note what became of me.

    Boyle’s theory explains the whole range of God’s actings in the world, those things that injure man as well as those which advantage him.

  2. 2

    Something done by a party—so called to avoid confusion with the legal senses of deed and action.

  3. 3

    Pretending.

  4. 4

    The occupation of an actor.

Forms

plural
actings
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).