Bashing

How to spell bashing

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce bashing

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does bashing mean?

1. nounA severe physical beating, or a sustained burst of harsh criticism.
2. verbPresent participle of bash: hitting something forcefully and repeatedly.

Bashing in a sentence

• noun

  The boxer took a real bashing in the final round.

• verb

  He kept bashing the stuck drawer until it finally opened.

• noun

  The new policy received a public bashing from every newspaper.

• verb

  She was bashing the keyboard in frustration over the crashed file.

Where does bashing come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word is built on the verb 'bash', which first appears in English in the early 1600s with the sense of striking something violently so as to crush or smash it. The origin of 'bash' itself is uncertain, but it is widely thought to be imitative, a sound word that may blend the impact of 'bang' with the destruction of 'smash' and 'dash'; some scholars also connect it to Scandinavian forms such as the Old Norse 'baska', meaning to drudge or work hard. Adding the suffix '-ing' produced both the present participle and a noun naming the act itself, so a 'bashing' came to mean a sustained beating. By the twentieth century the word had developed a popular figurative use for relentless verbal attack or harsh public criticism, as in 'media-bashing'. Because the consonant sound is doubled in spelling before '-ing', the trap is remembering the 'sh' followed by a single set of letters rather than over-doubling.

How the word is built

• bash (to strike hard)
• -ing (forming a noun or present participle)