Busting

How to spell busting

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce busting

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does busting mean?

1. verbInformally breaking, smashing, or bursting something apart.
2. verbIn informal usage, raiding a place or catching someone in an illegal act.

Busting in a sentence

• The kids were busting open the piñata in the garden.

• The squad spent the night busting an illegal gambling den downtown.

• He kept busting the seams of his old jacket every time he reached up.

• Detectives were busting a counterfeit operation in the warehouse district.

Where does busting come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the present participle of the verb 'bust', which began life in early American English of the 1800s as a casual, dialectal pronunciation of 'burst'. The older word 'burst' descends from the Old English 'berstan', meaning 'to break suddenly' or 'to fly apart', a thoroughly Germanic root with relatives across the old North Sea languages. Over time 'bust' drifted away from simply meaning 'burst' and picked up a cluster of informal senses: to break something, to demote or reduce in rank, and, in police slang, to raid a place or arrest a person. The spelling stays phonetically simple, so the only real trap is the single 't' before the '-ing', since the short vowel does not force the doubling that words like 'cutting' take. The whole family, from 'burst' to 'bust', keeps that sense of something giving way under sudden pressure.

How the word is built

• bust (to break or burst)
• -ing (present participle suffix)