Branching

How to spell branching

9 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce branching

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does branching mean?

1. verbDividing into two or more separate parts, paths, or lines that spread outward from a single point.

Branching in a sentence

• The river keeps branching into smaller channels as it nears the sea.

• The software charts every branching path a customer might follow.

Where does branching come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The core word branch comes from the Late Latin branca, which literally meant an animal's paw or claw. By a natural visual leap, the spreading limbs of a tree were seen as the paws of the trunk, and the word came to mean a bough. It passed into Old French as branche and was borrowed into English in the 1200s, keeping both the literal tree sense and a quickly growing range of figurative ones: a fork in a road, a division of a family, a department of an organisation. The suffix -ing turns it into the present participle and into an adjective describing anything that divides and spreads outward, as in branching corridors or a branching decision tree. The spelling stays regular here, since the silent rule about doubling consonants does not apply: branch ends in a consonant cluster, so you simply add -ing without changing anything.

How the word is built

• branch (limb of a tree, from Late Latin branca: a paw or claw)
• -ing (verbal/adjectival suffix)