Ailing

How to spell ailing

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce ailing

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does ailing mean?

1. adjectiveIn poor health; chronically sick or unwell.
2. adjectiveIn a weak, declining, or failing state, as a business or economy.

Ailing in a sentence

• She took a month off work to care for her ailing mother.

• The government pledged funds to rescue the ailing steel industry.

• The ailing patient was moved to a quieter ward for rest.

• Investors lost confidence in the ailing company after the third loss.

Where does ailing come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word grows from the verb 'ail', which comes from the Old English 'eglan' (also spelled 'eglian'), meaning 'to trouble, afflict, or cause pain to'. That verb belonged to a wider Germanic family of words about hardship and distress, and in its earliest English use the trouble could be of any kind, not only physical sickness. Over the medieval and early modern centuries the sense narrowed toward bodily illness, giving us the familiar question form 'what ails you?'. The present participle 'ailing' settled into use as an adjective describing someone who is persistently unwell, and by extension anything in poor or failing condition, such as a business or an economy. The single 'l' is the spelling trap here: because so many English words double a consonant before '-ing', writers are tempted to write 'ailling', but 'ail' ends in a vowel-plus-l after a long vowel sound and keeps just one 'l'.

How the word is built

• ail (to trouble, to be unwell)
• -ing (present participle / adjective suffix)