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helping

nounverbcommon in dialogue

  • //ˈhɛlpɪŋ//

The act of giving aid or assistance (to).

noun

  1. 1

    The act of giving aid or assistance (to).

    She finds great joy in helping people.

  2. 2

    A portion or serving, especially of food that one takes for oneself, or to which one helps oneself.

    She eagerly took a second helping of ice cream.

  3. 3

    figurativeAn amount or quantity.

    Wayne Rooney marked his England return with the goal that secured a place in Euro 2012's last eight - but it was a rough passage eased by helpings of good fortune and controversy against Ukraine.

Etymology

From Middle English helping, helpinge, helpynge, equivalent to help + -ing.

verb

  1. 1

    Also a form of helppresent participle and gerund of help

Etymology

From Middle English helpinge, helpynge, helpinde, helponde, helpand, from Old English helpende, present participle of Old English helpan (“to help”), equivalent to help + -ing. Cognate with Dutch helpend, German helfend, Swedish hjälpande.

Forms

plural
helpings
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).