noun The act or action of doing good, especially naively in humanitarian causes.
Related Forms:
Word History: While at first glance the words
do-gooding and
do-gooder do not seem to offer much food for thought, a closer look reveals an interesting characteristic of English word-formation. The suffixes
-ing and
-er are normally attached to the base of a verb, as in
singing, singer. But there is no verb
“to do-good”; rather, there is only a phrase
to do good, with
do being the verb. The forms
do-gooding and
do-gooder illustrate a tendency of English to treat certain compound expressions as indivisible units that are inflected at the end and not in the middle as one might expect. The phenomenon is seen also in nonstandard plurals like
mother-in-laws for
mothers-in-law. Over time, the three-word phrase
mother in law was reanalyzed as a single word, now written with hyphens, leading some speakers to inflect it at the end, like most single words.