Skip to content
OneKitly

riding

verbnounnouncommon in dialogue

  • //ˈɹaɪ.dɪŋ//

A path cut through woodland.

verb

  1. 1

    Also a form of ridepresent participle and gerund of ride

Etymology

From Middle English rydyng; equivalent to ride + -ing.

noun

  1. 1

    A path cut through woodland.

  2. 2

    The act of one who rides; a mounted excursion.

    I like nothing better than to hear of your ridings, and shootings, and boatings.

  3. 3

    The behaviour in the motion of a vehicle, such as oscillation.

    The admirable smoothness of the riding also reflected the greatest credit on those who, despite the difficulties caused by the shortage of men and materials, have succeeded in maintaining the track in such first-class order.

    A maximum of 80 m.p.h. was quickly reached on the 1 in 264 down through Three Bridges and at this pace the riding was exemplary.

  4. 4

    historicalA festival procession.

    It was sung from the top of the oldest house in the burgh every June at the Common riding, which served both for a perambulation of the bounds of the common pastures or Haughs and to commemorate the young men of Harwick[.]

noun

  1. 1

    historicalAny of the three administrative divisions of Yorkshire and some other northern counties of England.

  2. 2

    Electoral district or constituency.

    Ontario shall be divided into the Counties, Ridings of Counties, Cities, Parts of Cities, and Towns enumerated in the First Schedule to this Act[…]

Etymology

PIE word *tréyes From trithing (initial /t/ absorbed into preceding north, south, east, west, inner ⟨th⟩ already sometimes /d/ in Middle English), from Middle English trithing, tridinge, from Old English *þriþing, from Old Norse þriðjungr (“third part”), from Proto-Germanic *þridjô (“third”) (English third). Equivalent to third + -ing; compare with farthing (“fourth part”). Cognate with English trithing. The folk etymology that connects the term to the area a horse-rider could cover in a single day is incorrect, but may have influenced the spelling and pronunciation.

Forms

plural
ridings
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).