Reckoning

How to spell reckoning

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce reckoning

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does reckoning mean?

1. nounA calculation or considered estimate of an amount, cost, or position.
2. nounThe settlement of accounts, or a time when past actions must be answered for.

Reckoning in a sentence

• By my reckoning the trip will cost us about four hundred pounds.

• The auditors warned that a financial reckoning was overdue for the company.

• The navigator's reckoning placed the ship roughly ten miles off the coast.

• After years of careless spending, the family faced a painful reckoning.

Where does reckoning come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word grows from the verb 'reckon', which descends from the Old English (ge)recenian, meaning 'to recount, relate, or explain in order'. That early sense was about putting things in their proper sequence, and from counting items in order it slid naturally into the modern idea of calculating or adding up. The root belongs to a wider family of Germanic words, with close cousins in the Dutch rekenen and the German rechnen, both meaning 'to calculate', which shows how old and stable this 'counting' sense really is. By the time the '-ing' form settled into English it carried two everyday threads: the plain act of computing a figure, and the moment when accounts are settled or consequences must be faced. The doubled letter to watch is the 'ck' in the middle, sitting before the unstressed second syllable that swallows its vowel, which is exactly where careful writers slip.

How the word is built

• reckon (from Old English (ge)recenian: to recount, explain, calculate)
• -ing (noun suffix)