Skip to content
Allin

kissing

verbadjectivenouncommon in dialogue

  • United States//ˈkɪsɪŋ//

That kisses; engaged in a kiss or kissing.

verb

  1. 1

    Also a form of kisspresent participle and gerund of kiss

Etymology

From Middle English kissynge, cussinde, from Old English cyssende, from Proto-West Germanic *kussijandī, from Proto-Germanic *kussijandz, equivalent to kiss + -ing. Cognate with Saterland Frisian küsjend, Dutch kussend, German Low German küssend, German küssend, Swedish kyssande, Icelandic kyssandi.

adjective

  1. 1

    That kisses; engaged in a kiss or kissing.

  2. 2

    Just touching.

noun

  1. 1

    The act of giving a kiss or making out.

    There began to be some movement preparatory to the resumption of our journey, and, after many huggings and kissings, the family parted, and the wagon drove off[…]

Etymology

From Middle English kissynge, kyssynge, kessinge, from Old English *cyssing, from Proto-West Germanic *kussīngu, equivalent to kiss + -ing. Cognate with Middle Dutch cussinge (whence Dutch kussing (“kissing”)), Middle Low German küssinge (“kissing”), Middle High German küssunge (“kissing”). Compare also Old English cossettung (“kissing”).

Forms

plural
kissings
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).