Brooding

How to spell brooding

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce brooding

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does brooding mean?

1. adjectiveAppearing deeply unhappy, preoccupied, or darkly menacing.
2. verbDwelling persistently and gloomily on a worry, or (of a bird) sitting to incubate eggs.

Brooding in a sentence

• adjective

  The actor was cast for his brooding good looks and quiet manner.

• verb

  He spent the weekend brooding over the missed promotion.

• adjective

  A brooding silence settled over the table after the argument.

• verb

  She kept brooding about the unanswered email instead of going to sleep.

Where does brooding come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word grows directly from the native English noun 'brood', which in Old English was 'brod' and meant a hatching of young birds or the warmth used to incubate eggs. The underlying Germanic root carries the sense of heat, the same idea behind the words 'breed' and the warm steam of a 'broth', since all involve gentle, sustained warmth. From the literal picture of a hen sitting patiently over her eggs came the figurative verb 'to brood', meaning to sit with one fixed thought, dwelling on it the way a bird dwells over a nest. By the seventeenth century 'brooding' had taken on the now familiar mood of dark, heavy, anxious reflection, and from there it stretched to describe a menacing, oppressive atmosphere. The spelling keeps the simple double-o of the original 'brod', so the trap for adults is purely whether to write 'brood' with one or two letter o's before adding the regular -ing.

How the word is built

• brood (Old English brod: offspring, a hatching)
• -ing (forming a participle/adjective)