Awaiting

Awaiting is the present participle and gerund form of the English verb await. It denotes the action of waiting for something or someone, often framed as an ongoing process or a state of anticipation. In ordinary use, awaiting appears in sentences such as, “We are awaiting the results,” or in participial phrases such as, “The crowd, awaiting the speaker’s arrival, grew restless.” A contract, for example, may be described as awaiting signature.

Grammatically, await is transitive and takes a direct object: we await the decision, we are awaiting your response. The -ing form also functions as a participial adjective before a noun, as in “units awaiting orders,” “a situation awaiting resolution,” or “teams awaiting confirmation.” In such phrases, awaiting conveys a sense of pending status related to the noun it describes.

Etymology is not always central to daily use, but the word is formed from the prefix a- combined with wait, a pattern typical of English compounds. The result expresses ongoing action or state associated with waiting, and the form awaiting has long been part of standard usage in both formal and informal writing.

In computing, a related term is await, a keyword used in asynchronous programming to suspend execution until a result is available. The participial form awaiting is rarely a technical term in programming, and is typically used in general prose to describe a pending status (for example, “the result, awaiting confirmation”). Overall, awaiting remains a versatile term for describing pending outcomes in both everyday language and formal writing.