Boarding

How to spell boarding

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce boarding

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does boarding mean?

1. nounThe act of getting onto a ship, aircraft, train, or bus.
2. nounAccommodation that includes regular meals, especially in a school or lodging house.
3. nounBoards or planks fixed together to form a surface or covering.

Boarding in a sentence

• Boarding for the flight to Lisbon begins forty minutes before departure.

• The fees cover tuition as well as boarding for pupils who live at the school.

• The builders replaced the rotten boarding along the garden fence.

• Passengers in the rear seats were called for boarding first.

• She spent her teenage years at a boarding school in the countryside.

• Timber boarding lined the walls of the converted barn.

Where does boarding come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word grows from the Old English 'bord', a word that meant both a flat plank of wood and, by extension, the table at which people ate. Because meals were taken at the board, the noun came to stand for the food and lodging itself, which is why 'board' still means provided meals in phrases like 'room and board'. The verb 'to board' developed several practical senses: to cover something with planks, to supply someone with regular meals, and, from the planked deck of a ship, to climb aboard a vessel. The form 'boarding' is the verb's present participle pressed into service as a noun, and it carried all of those meanings forward into the modern era. The spelling trap lives in the middle: the long vowel is written 'oar', the same group seen in 'oar' and 'hoard', not the simpler 'or' that the sound might suggest.

How the word is built

• board (from Old English bord: plank, table)
• -ing (forming a noun or present participle)