heartening
Britishadjective
Explanation
Something heartening reassures or inspires you. You'll feel better after struggling with a long English essay when you read your teacher's heartening comments. If you're halfway through a marathon, the sight of your friends cheering you on is heartening. A shy new student will also find the warm welcome he gets from his classmates to be extremely heartening. This cheerful adjective comes from the verb hearten. "give confidence," or "encourage," which is rooted in a figurative sense of heart — to "give heart to" means "to give confidence to."
Vocabulary lists containing heartening
An Elephant in the Garden
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Favorable
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
Maximize the heartening and heartrending, and you’ll stand to maximize the viewer’s compassion, too.
From Salon • Apr. 26, 2026
While Johnson said the outpouring for the family is heartening, others say they have been left uneasy.
From The Wall Street Journal • Feb. 16, 2026
Also heartening to Wall Street, Southwest’s outlook for the current quarter included impacts from the severe winter storm that swept the U.S. over the weekend.
From MarketWatch • Jan. 29, 2026
At the corner of Lake and Mariposa in Altadena, two restaurants — Betsy and Miya — are heartening signs of life just a few hundred feet apart.
From Los Angeles Times • Jan. 26, 2026
The coffee was heartening and there was always a bun or a bologna sandwich to sustain her.
From "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" by Betty Smith
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
