Other forms: reckonings
A reckoning is a calculation, or the settling of accounts. By my reckoning, a day of reckoning, the final reckoning.
By my reckoning is a hedge before a figure worked out roughly. Dead reckoning is navigation by course and speed alone, without landmarks or satellites, and it is how ships crossed oceans for centuries. The day of reckoning is when accounts are settled and consequences arrive, which is biblical in origin and now used of anything overdue. Note reckon; and to be reckoned with, meaning formidable.
1nouncalculationA calculation.
“By my reckoning, we should reach the coast before dark.”
2nounreckoningThe settling of accounts and consequences.
“After years of borrowing, the day of reckoning came when the bank demanded its money back.”
reckoning is a calculation or settling.
Reckon plus -ing. Reckon comes from Old English gerecenian, to explain or count, and the German Rechnung, a bill, is the same word doing the same job.
Proto-Indo-European
*h₃reǵ-
Proto-West Germanic
*rekanōn — to count, explain
Old English
recenian — to pay; arrange, dispose, reckon
Middle English
rekenen
English
reckon
English, today
reckoning
Built from
Gerund of the verb reckon, from reckon + ing. Compare Dutch rekening, German Rechnung. reckon comes from Middle English rekenen, from Old English recenian (“to pay; arrange, dispose, reckon”) and ġerecenian (“to explain, recount, relate”); both from Proto-West Germanic rekanōn (“to count, explain”), from Proto-West Germanic rekan (“swift, ready, prompt”), from Proto-Indo-European h₃reǵ- (“to make straight or right”). Cognate with Scots rekkin (“to enumerate, mention, narrate, rehearse, count, calculate, compute”), stq reekenje (“to calculate, figure, reckon”), West Frisian rekkenje (“to account, tally, calculate, figure”), Dutch rekenen (“to count, calculate, reckon, charge”), German Low German reken (“to reckon”), German rechnen (“to count, reckon, calculate”), Danish regne (“to calculate”), Swedish räkna (“to count, calculate, reckon”), Norwegian Nynorsk rekna (“to calculate”), Icelandic reikna (“to calculate”), Latin rectus (“straight, right”). See also reck, reach.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA