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say it: SPER-ing
sparing is an adjective meaning "avoiding waste". It carries one recorded sense.
avoiding waste
“an economical meal”
“an economical shopper”
“a frugal farmer”
“a frugal lunch”
“a sparing father and a spending son”
“sparing in their use of heat and light”
“stinting in bestowing gifts”
“thrifty because they remember the great Depression”
“`scotch' is used only informally”
colloquialism
Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.
Definitions, synonyms and semantic relations for sparing come from Princeton University’s WordNet. The pronunciation comes from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. Commonness is measured against a corpus of everyday English. Full sources and licences.