Bringing

How to spell bringing

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce bringing

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does bringing mean?

1. verbThe act of carrying, conveying, or causing something or someone to come to a place or state.

Bringing in a sentence

• She is bringing the contract to the meeting this afternoon.

• The new policy is bringing real change to the department.

Where does bringing come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the present participle of the verb 'bring', one of the oldest words in English. It descends from the Old English 'bringan', meaning to carry, lead, or convey something to a place, which in turn came from the Proto-Germanic 'brenganan', the same ancestor that gave Dutch 'brengen' and German 'bringen'. The verb has always belonged to the irregular family, which is why its past tense is the unusual 'brought' rather than a tidy 'bringed'. The participle form simply adds the familiar '-ing' ending, and the spelling stays regular because the base word ends in a single consonant after a consonant cluster, so nothing is doubled. The common writing slip is to drop the first 'g' and produce 'bringing' as the unrelated 'brining' (soaking in salt water), so it helps to remember that 'bring' keeps all its letters before '-ing'.

How the word is built

• bring (to carry, convey)
• -ing (present participle suffix)