Babysitting

How to spell babysitting

11 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce babysitting

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does babysitting mean?

1. nounThe activity of looking after a child or children while the parents are away.

Babysitting in a sentence

• She earns extra money from babysitting on weekend evenings.

• The teenager next door is available for babysitting during the holidays.

Where does babysitting come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a compound built from 'baby' and 'sit', and the curious part is the order in which the pieces arrived. The agent noun 'babysitter' came first in American English around the 1930s, picturing someone who literally 'sits' with a child while the parents are out. From that noun English then worked backwards, a process called back-formation, to produce the verb 'babysit', and 'babysitting' is simply its present participle and gerund. The verb 'sit' is a thoroughly native Old English word, sittan, meaning 'to be seated', from the same ancient root that gives us 'seat' and 'set'. The spelling trap lives in that last part: because 'sit' ends in a single short-vowel consonant, the t doubles before -ing, giving the -tt- of 'babysitting'.

How the word is built

• baby (infant)
• sit (to mind/tend)
• -ing (verb/noun suffix, with the t doubled after a short stressed vowel)