seeming

Etymology

verb

1. present participle and gerund of seem

adj

1. Appearing to the eye or mind (distinguished from, and often opposed to, real or actual).
   seeming friendship
   I'le hide my anger in a seeming calm, And what I have to do, consult the while, And mask my vengeance underneath a smile. 1671, Aphra Behn, The Amorous Prince, or, The Curious Husband, London: Thomas Dring, act II, scene 5, pages 32–33
   Of all the English philosophers, I most reverence Bacon, that great and hardy genius: he it is who, undaunted by the seeming difficulties that oppose, prompts human curiosity to examine every part of nature; 1765, Oliver Goldsmith, Essays, London: W. Griffin, Essay 18, p. 150
   […] she was overcome like the thirsty one who is drawn toward the seeming water in the desert […] 1876, George Eliot, chapter 27, in Daniel Deronda
   […] though they marched in seeming peace, the hearts of all the army, from the highest to the lowest, were downcast, and with every mile that they went north foreboding of evil grew heavier on them. 1955, J. R. R. Tolkien, chapter 10, in The Return of the King, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, published 2012
   All the A.C.V. four-wheel diesel railbuses are now stored in seeming disrepair at Derby Friargate. 1962 January, “Motive Power Miscellany: London Midland Region: Midland Lines”, in Modern Railways, page 59
   Fields (or “camps”) enclosed by chest-high wire fences now contain thousands of ostriches in seeming harmony, sometimes spread out like feathered chess pieces, sometimes seated in clusters. August 4, 2020, Richard Conniff, “They may look goofy, but ostriches are nobody’s fool”, in National Geographic Magazine

noun

1. Outward appearance.
   I am not what I seemed to her, he thought, and doubtless she is not what she seemed to me, but it is our lot to be irrevocably condemned to seemings and to deserve them too. 1971, Iris Murdoch, An Accidental Man, New York: Viking, page 162
2. (obsolete) Apprehension; judgement.
   Nothing more cleare vnto their seeming, then that a new Jerusalem being often spoken of in Scripture, they vndoubtedly were themselues that newe Ierusalem, 1604, Richard Hooker, Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie, London: Preface, page 39