Waiving

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. The act of giving up a right or claim voluntarily ; choosing not to enforce a rule or requirement in a particular case
2. Voluntarily foregoing a legal right or claim ; deciding to not apply a regulation or condition temporarily
3. The intentional abandonment of a privilege or demand ; the decision not to implement a stipulated rule or criteria

Etymology: The most surprising thing about "waiving" is that the verb has two unrelated origins that happen to have merged. One strand, the sense of renouncing a right, comes from Anglo-Norman "weyver", meaning "to abandon, allow to become a waif", a term for stray property that no one claims. Its Old French source "gaiver" also meant "to abandon", and it traces back to a Scandinavian or North Germanic root. In Middle English the verb took the form "weyven", meaning "to avoid, renounce", so giving up a claim to something lay at its heart from the start. The other strand is a separate verb meaning "to wave, swing", from Old Norse "veifa", which came into English as Middle English "weyven" and was also used in the sense of "to wave, waver". Its ancestor is a Proto-Germanic form, so the two verbs share a sound but not a root. Over time the legal sense of abandoning a claim survived as the dominant one, which is why the modern word is used in contexts like waiving a fee or waiving a rule.

Synonyms: relinquishing, forgoing

Antonyms: claiming, asserting