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Allin

ending

nounverbcommon in dialogue

  • //ˈɛndɪŋ//

A termination or conclusion.

noun

  1. 1

    A termination or conclusion.

  2. 2

    The last part of something.

    The book has a happy ending.

    The film has an unexpected ending.

    Modern romance, like Greek tragedy, celebrates the mystery of dismemberment, which is life in time. The happy ending is justly scorned as a misrepresentation; for the world, as we know it, as we have seen it, yields but one ending: death, disintegration, dismemberment, and the crucifixion of our heart with the passing of the forms that we have loved.

  3. 3

    The last morpheme of a word, added to some base to make an inflected form (such as -s in "dogs").

    Spanish verb forms have different endings depending on the tense, mood and person.

    Using diachronic evidence from Swedish, I will show that inflectional endings may be maintained as “less cumulative” inflections, or even degrammaticalize into a derivational suffix or a clitic.

Etymology

From Middle English endynge, endyng, endinge, from Old English endung, ġeendung (“ending”), equivalent to end + -ing. Cognate with Dutch ending (“ending”), German Endung (“ending”).

verb

  1. 1

    Also a form of endpresent participle and gerund of end

Etymology

From Middle English ending, endyng, endende, from Old English endiende, from Proto-Germanic *andijōndz, present participle of Proto-Germanic *andijōną (“to end”), equivalent to end + -ing.

Forms

plural
endings
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).