Bridging

How to spell bridging

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce bridging

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does bridging mean?

1. verbForming a link across a gap, or joining two separate things together.
2. adjectiveDescribing short-term funding that covers a gap until longer-term money arrives, as in a bridging loan.

Bridging in a sentence

• verb

  The new committee is focused on bridging the gap between staff and management.

• adjective

  They took out a bridging loan to buy the new house before the old one sold.

• verb

  A wooden plank was used for bridging the narrow stream.

• adjective

  The developer arranged bridging finance to cover costs until the mortgage came through.

Where does bridging come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the present participle of the verb 'bridge', which descends from the Old English noun 'brycg', meaning a structure built across a river or gap. The Old English word has close cousins across the Germanic languages, including Dutch 'brug' and German 'Brücke', all pointing back to a shared ancestor for a raised crossing. The verb sense, meaning to span or join two separated things, grew naturally out of the noun and was well established by the late Middle Ages. The spelling trap lives in the middle: the base word ends in a silent 'e' after the 'dg', and that 'e' is dropped before '-ing', leaving the 'dg' cluster that already supplies the soft 'j' sound. Writers who keep the 'e' (the incorrect 'bridgeing') are simply forgetting the standard rule that a final silent 'e' falls away before a vowel-starting suffix.

How the word is built

• bridg- (from bridge, a structure that spans a gap)
• -ing (present participle / gerund suffix)