Canning

How to spell canning

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce canning

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does canning mean?

1. nounThe process of preserving food by sealing it in airtight cans or jars.
2. verbPresent participle of 'can': sealing food in containers, or informally dismissing someone or something.

Canning in a sentence

• noun

  Home canning of tomatoes is a popular summer task in the kitchen.

• verb

  They spent the afternoon canning peaches before the fruit spoiled.

• noun

  The factory expanded its canning line to handle more vegetables.

• verb

  Management is canning the outdated project to save money.

Where does canning come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word grows from 'can', which traces back to the Old English 'canne', a word for a cup or vessel that has close cousins across the Germanic languages, including the Dutch 'kan' and German 'Kanne'. For centuries 'can' simply meant a container for liquid, and only in the early nineteenth century did the sealed metal 'can' for preserved food appear, after the inventor Nicolas Appert and others developed methods of sealing food against spoilage. From that noun English formed the verb 'to can', meaning to seal food in airtight containers, and 'canning' is its verbal noun. The doubled 'n' in the spelling follows the regular English rule: a short stressed vowel before a single final consonant doubles that consonant before '-ing', so 'can' becomes 'canning' rather than 'caning'. That single versus double 'n' is the whole trap, since 'caning' (beating with a cane) is an entirely different word.

How the word is built

• can (from Old English canne: a container)
• -ing (verbal noun / present participle suffix)