Booming

How to spell booming

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce booming

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does booming mean?

1. adjectiveGrowing or flourishing rapidly, especially in business or economic terms.
2. adjectiveMaking a deep, loud, resonant sound.

Booming in a sentence

• The city has a booming tech sector that attracts skilled workers.

• The announcer had a booming voice that filled the entire stadium.

• Property prices climbed sharply during the booming housing market.

• A booming clap of thunder rattled the windows late at night.

Where does booming come from?

Language of origin: Dutch

The base word 'boom' is imitative in origin, formed in the late Middle Ages to echo the deep, hollow, resonant noise made by bees, bitterns, large bells, or cannon. English likely reinforced it from the Dutch verb 'bommen', meaning 'to hum' or 'to drone', which carried the same echoic quality. From the literal sense of a loud, rolling sound, the word took on a figurative life: by the nineteenth century, especially in American commercial slang, something that was 'booming' was growing loudly and rapidly, like a market suddenly surging. The participle 'booming' simply adds the familiar '-ing' ending to that verb, and because the root is a single long vowel followed by a single 'm', the spelling trap is remembering one 'o' pair and one 'm' before the ending, not doubling the 'm'.

How the word is built

• boom (imitative root: a deep resonant sound)
• -ing (present participle / adjective suffix)