reckoning
n. C / Un. a time when people are forced to deal with the results of their past bad actions. It is a moment of judgment or consequences that you can no longer avoid.
n. A time when past mistakes or misdeeds are judged and consequences must be faced. A secondary, now archaic sense refers to a process of calculation or estimation.
The company faces a day of reckoning.
After years of environmental damage, the industry now faces a public reckoning and calls for reform.
The novel portrays the end of the empire as a slow, painful reckoning with its own history of violence and colonial exploitation.
A gerund formed from reckon with the addition of the suffix -ing; compare Dutch rekening and German Rechnung.
Frequently appears in the fixed phrase 'a day of reckoning' or is used with verbs like 'face' or 'come'. Uncountable when used as an abstract concept ('the time for reckoning has come'), countable when referring to a specific event ('the company faced several reckonings').