Other forms: feelings
A feeling is whatever is going on inside you — happiness, fear, guilt, hunger, the flutter before an exam. The warm feeling when someone remembers your name; the sinking feeling when you check your bank balance.
Feeling covers three different insides. It is emotion (a feeling of relief), it is physical sensation (a strange feeling in my knee, no feeling in my toes after the walk home), and it is a hunch you cannot prove (I have a feeling she already knows). The plural, feelings, means somebody's emotional state as a whole, which is why you hurt someone's feelings and never hurt their feeling. It also names sympathy and warmth: she sang the last verse with real feeling; he read the letter out without any feeling at all. Bad feeling between two people is resentment left over from a row.
1nounfeelingSomething you experience in your mind, such as joy, fear or guilt.~57%
“A feeling of relief spread through the whole room.”
2nounbodySomething you experience in your body; the power to sense touch.~29%
“I had no feeling in my fingers after waiting at the bus stop.”
3nounideaAn idea or belief you hold without proof.~10%
“I have a feeling we have met somewhere before.”
4nounemotionsA person's emotions, thought of as something that can be hurt.~2%
“He apologised for hurting her feelings.”
5nounsympathySympathy or emotional warmth shown in what somebody does.~2%
“She played the slow movement with great feeling.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 20 sentences found in the wild and placed 20 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
feeling is an emotion or sensation.
Feeling is feel with -ing on the end, written felynge in Middle English. English does this constantly: the ending turns an act into a thing, which is how we get building, meeting and painting. Feeling is the same trick applied to the sense of touch, and the word now does duty for both the skin and the heart.
Middle English
felynge
English, today
feeling
From Middle English felynge, equivalent to feel + ing.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA