Auditing

How to spell auditing

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce auditing

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does auditing mean?

1. verbCarrying out an official examination of financial records or processes to check their accuracy.
2. verbAttending a course or class as an observer, without taking it for formal credit or a grade.

Auditing in a sentence

• The firm is auditing our accounts before the annual report goes out.

• He is auditing the evening philosophy lectures purely out of interest.

• She spent the week auditing the charity's expense claims for errors.

• Because she already had the degree, she was auditing the seminar rather than enrolling.

Where does auditing come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb audire, which simply meant 'to hear'. From it came the noun auditus, 'a hearing', and the form audit, literally 'he hears', because in the days before widespread literacy the accounts of an estate or a business were read aloud and verified by listening rather than by reading columns of figures. English took the word in during the 1400s, first for that formal hearing of accounts, and the financial sense of a careful official examination grew directly out of it. The same audire root gives us 'audible', 'audience', and 'auditorium', all gathered around the idea of hearing. A useful spelling note: because the stress falls on the first syllable of 'audit', the final t is not doubled when -ing is added, so it is auditing, not 'auditting'.

How the word is built

• audit (from Latin audire: to hear)
• -ing (present participle / gerund)