Cancelling

How to spell cancelling

10 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce cancelling

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does cancelling mean?

1. verbCalling off, annulling, or stopping something that was arranged or in effect.

Cancelling in a sentence

• The airline kept cancelling flights because of the storm.

• She spent the morning cancelling her old magazine subscriptions.

Where does cancelling come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb cancellare, which literally meant 'to make a lattice' or 'to mark with crossed lines', and from there came to mean 'to strike out'. That verb grew from cancelli, meaning a 'lattice', 'grating', or 'crossbars', a diminutive of cancer in its older sense of 'lattice' (a relative of the word that also gave us 'chancel', the latticed-off part of a church). The connecting idea is vivid: to cancel something was to draw crossing lines through it, exactly as you might scratch out a mistake on a page. English took the word in through Old French canceller during the late Middle Ages, and by the 1400s it carried the modern sense of annulling or doing away with something. In British and Canadian spelling the final 'l' doubles before the '-ing' ending, giving 'cancelling'; American writers usually keep a single 'l' in 'canceling', and that mismatch is the main spelling trap.

How the word is built

• cancel (from Latin cancellare: to cross out with lattice lines)
• -l- (doubled before suffix in British spelling)
• -ing (present participle)

British and American spelling

Cancelling is the British spelling. American English spells it canceling.