Budgeting

How to spell budgeting

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce budgeting

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does budgeting mean?

1. nounThe activity of planning how income will be allocated to spending and saving.

Budgeting in a sentence

• Careful budgeting helped the couple clear their credit card debt within a year.

• The finance team spent the whole afternoon budgeting for next quarter.

Where does budgeting come from?

Language of origin: French

The word traces back to the Latin bulga, meaning a leather bag or pouch, which passed into Old French as bouge, then took the diminutive form bougette, literally 'a little leather bag'. English borrowed it in the 1400s as 'budget', at first simply meaning a pouch or wallet and its contents. The financial sense grew from a vivid parliamentary image: the British Chancellor was said 'to open the budget', that is, to open the bag and reveal the nation's planned income and spending. From that money-planning sense came the verb 'to budget', and adding -ing produced 'budgeting', the ongoing activity of allocating funds. The single 't' is the spelling trap, since the base word 'budget' ends in a single t and the suffix simply attaches without doubling.

How the word is built

• budget (from Old French bougette: little bag)
• -ing (forming a gerund/present participle)