Banning

How to spell banning

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce banning

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does banning mean?

1. verbOfficially forbidding or prohibiting something.

Banning in a sentence

• The council is banning cars from the high street on weekends.

• Banning smoking in restaurants improved air quality almost overnight.

Where does banning come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the present participle of the verb 'ban', which descends from the Old English 'bannan', meaning 'to summon, command, or proclaim'. In its earliest sense the word carried the idea of an official, public proclamation, and from there it drifted toward proclaiming a prohibition or a curse against someone. The same root spread through the Germanic languages and even fed into French 'ban', the term for a feudal lord's public decree, which is why the marriage 'banns' (the public announcement of an intended wedding) share this ancestry. By late medieval English the dominant meaning had settled into 'to forbid officially'. The spelling trap in 'banning' is purely modern: because the base word ends in a single short-vowel syllable, the consonant doubles before -ing, so it is two n's, not one.

How the word is built

• ban (to prohibit)
• -n- (doubled consonant)
• -ing (present participle/gerund)