Breathing

How to spell breathing

9 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce breathing

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does breathing mean?

1. nounThe act or process of taking air into the lungs and expelling it.
2. verbThe present participle of breathe, taking air in and out of the lungs.

Breathing in a sentence

• noun

  The nurse monitored his breathing throughout the night.

• verb

  She lay quietly, breathing in the cool morning air.

• noun

  Slow, steady breathing helps to calm the nerves before a presentation.

• verb

  The runner was still breathing heavily at the finish line.

Where does breathing come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word grows out of the native Old English noun bræþ, which originally meant something more like 'odour', 'vapour', or 'exhalation' than the act of respiration itself. From that noun came the verb breathe, and the modern spelling preserves a useful pattern: the verb breathe and its forms keep the silent final 'e' and the soft 'th', while the noun breath drops it. The form 'breathing' is simply the verb plus the -ing ending that turns it into a gerund or present participle, used in English since the medieval period. Because the spelling traces back through breathe, learners who remember the e in the verb will keep the 'ea' and the th in 'breathing' too. The root is purely Germanic, shared with related words across the older Germanic languages, and it has stayed close to home rather than passing through Latin or French.

How the word is built

• breath (Old English bræþ: air drawn into and out of the lungs)
• -ing (forms the gerund/present participle)