or OFFERING, denotes the raising the price of a thing at a sale or auction. The French call this enchirier. It answers to what the Romans called licitari: they used to bid by holding up the hand or finger.

BIDDING is also used for proclaiming or notifying. In which sense we meet with bidding of the BANNS, the fame with what is otherwise called asking.

BIDDING Prayer. It was one part of the office of the deacons in the primitive Christian church, to be a sort of monitors and directors of the people in the exercise of their public devotions in the church. To which end they made use of certain known forms of words, to give notice when each part of the service began. This was called by the Greeks ἐκκλησίας, and by the Latins praedicare: which therefore does not ordinarily signify to preach, as some mistake it, but to perform the office of a crier (κηρύξ, or preeco) in the assembly; whence Synesius and others call the deacons ἐκκλησιαῖοι, the holy criers of the church, appointed to bid or exhort the congregation to pray and join in the several parts of the service of the church. Agreeable to this ancient practice is the form Let us pray, repeated before several of the prayers in the English liturgy.

BIDDING of the Beads, a charge or warning which the parish-priest gave to his parishioners at certain special times, to say so many pater-nosters, &c. on their beads.