Buying

How to spell buying

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce buying

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does buying mean?

1. verbThe act of purchasing or acquiring something in exchange for money.

Buying in a sentence

• Buying a house involves more paperwork than most people expect.

• She handles the buying of supplies for the whole department.

Where does buying come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the present participle of the verb 'buy', which descends from the Old English bycgan, meaning 'to purchase' or 'to acquire by paying'. The root traces back to Proto-Germanic bugjan, a verb of obscure origin that did not survive widely in the other Germanic languages, making English something of an outlier in keeping it. Over centuries the spelling drifted from the older 'bycgan' and 'bygge' forms to the modern 'buy', with the silent vowel cluster preserving little of the original pronunciation. The trap in 'buying' is precisely that the base 'buy' keeps its 'uy' spelling rather than dropping or changing the 'y', so the participle becomes 'buying' and not the tempting but wrong 'buing'. Because the word has been a core part of English commerce since before the Norman Conquest, it is among the oldest trading terms still in daily use.

How the word is built

• buy (from Old English bycgan: to purchase)
• -ing (present participle/verbal-noun suffix)