Other forms: meetings
A meeting is when people come together to talk about plans and decisions. A staff meeting, call a meeting, in a meeting.
In a meeting is the standard reason for being unavailable at work. Meeting room, minutes of the meeting and annual general meeting are the fixed phrases. A meeting is also any coming together: a chance meeting. Note that meeting is one of the words most complained about in working life, and that a meeting that could have been an email is now a recognised category.
1nounmeetingAn arranged gathering to talk about plans and decisions.~92%
“The meeting with the boss is at ten o'clock in her office.”
2nouncomingAny coming together of people.~8%
“It was a chance meeting on a platform and it changed everything.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 24 sentences found in the wild and placed 24 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
meeting is a gathering.
Old English meting comes from metan, to meet, from a root meaning to find. The word has always covered both the arranged gathering and the accidental encounter.
Old English
mēting
Middle English
meeting
English, today
meeting
Built from
From Middle English meeting, from Old English mēting. From Middle English meeting, meting, from Old English mēting, ġemēting (“meeting, assembly, association, society”), equivalent to meet + -ing. Cognate with West Frisian moeting (“meeting, encounter”), Dutch ontmoeting (“meeting, encounter”), Middle Low German mö̂tinge (“meeting”). Compare also German Low German Möte (“meeting, encounter”), Danish møde (“meeting, encounter”), Swedish möte (“meeting, encounter”), Icelandic mót (“meeting”). Related to moot.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA