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shopping

verbnouncommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈʃɒpɪŋ//
  • United States//ˈʃɑpɪŋ//

The process of buying goods or services, or searching for those suitable to buy.

verb

  1. 1

    Also a form of shoppresent participle and gerund of shop

Etymology

By surface analysis, shop + -ing.

noun

  1. 1

    The process of buying goods or services, or searching for those suitable to buy.

    On Saturdays we usually do the shopping.

    After a hard day's shopping, they had come home laden with bargains, and the dressing-room was strewed with Indian fans, ivory boxes, and lace.

    Here I began my shopping, was interviewed by dressmakers, and naturally had much to do to habit myself for civilized life again.

    Mother[…]considered that the exclusiveness of Peter's circle was due not to its distinction, but to the fact that it was an inner Babylon of prodigality and whoredom, from which every Kensingtonian held aloof, except on the conventional tip-and-run excursions in pursuit of shopping, tea and theatres.

  2. 2

    Recently bought goods.

    I carried three heavy bags of shopping up the stairs.

  3. 3

    An area's combination of stores and other infrastructure and products available for people who want to shop.

    Boston has good shopping.

  4. 4

    Placement in a workshop for overhaul.

    The five roller-bearing A1s are now averaging 120,000 miles between shopping; this figure is an improvement of about 50 per cent on the norm of other ex-L.N.E. Pacific types.

Forms

plural
shoppings
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).