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spying

verbnouncommon in dialogue

  • //ˈspaɪ.ɪŋ//

espionage; the act of secretly gathering information

verb

  1. 1

    Also a form of spypresent participle and gerund of spy

Etymology

See the etymology of the corresponding lemma form.

noun

  1. 1

    espionage; the act of secretly gathering information

    There are two ways in which the obsessive character of jealousy tends to exert itself: one is in the need to know, the endless tests and investigations and spyings that are so characteristic of jealousy.

Etymology

Inherited from Middle English spyinge, spiyng, spyeng, equivalent to spy + -ing.

Forms

plural
spyings
The neighbouring pages — Alphabetical 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).