Bowing

How to spell bowing

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce bowing

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does bowing mean?

1. verbBending the head or upper body forward as a gesture of greeting, respect, or thanks.
2. verbBending or curving out of a straight line, usually under weight or pressure.
3. verbDrawing the bow across the strings of an instrument such as a violin or cello.

Bowing in a sentence

• The actors were still bowing to the audience when the curtain fell.

• The old shelf was visibly bowing under the stacked encyclopedias.

• The teacher corrected her bowing to produce a smoother tone on the violin.

• The staff greeted each guest by bowing politely at the door.

• Damp had left the floorboards bowing in the middle of the room.

• Precise bowing is what gives a cello section its even sound.

Where does bowing come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The verb 'bow' meaning to bend the body comes from Old English 'bugan', meaning 'to bend' or 'to stoop', which traces back to a Germanic root shared with Dutch and German words for bending. From the earliest period it carried both the literal sense of bending an object and the social sense of inclining the head or torso in greeting or respect. The musical sense, the way a player draws the bow across the strings, ultimately rests on the same Germanic family, since the curved 'bow' that shoots arrows or plays a violin is named for the very fact that it is bent. The '-ing' ending is the ordinary English suffix that turns a verb into a present participle or a verbal noun, and it attaches without any change to the stem, which is why 'bowing' keeps the single 'w' rather than doubling any letter. The spelling is steady across English, and the only real trap is that the word is a heteronym: it is read two different ways depending on whether you mean bending forward or working a stringed instrument.

How the word is built

• bow (verb stem)
• -ing (present participle / verbal noun suffix)