Casing

How to spell casing

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce casing

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does casing mean?

1. nounA protective cover or outer layer enclosing something such as a machine, pipe, cable, or food.
2. verbInformally, inspecting or surveying a place carefully, often before a planned robbery.

Casing in a sentence

• noun

  A crack in the plastic casing exposed the wiring inside the router.

• verb

  The detectives believed the suspects had spent days casing the bank.

• noun

  The engineers lowered a steel casing into the well to stop it collapsing.

• verb

  A security guard noticed two men casing the parked cars in the lot.

Where does casing come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word builds on the noun 'case' in its sense of a container or covering, which English took in the 1200s from the Old French 'casse' (a box or chest), itself descended from the Latin 'capsa', meaning a box or holder for keeping things safe. That Latin root is also the ancestor of 'capsule' and the cash-holding 'case', so the family has always centred on the idea of an enclosing shell. By the 1500s English writers were adding the noun-forming '-ing' to produce 'casing' for the protective covering wrapped around something, whether a wheel, a sausage, or a length of pipe. The same '-ing' later did duty as the gerund of the verb 'to case', including the slang sense of looking a place over before a robbery. Knowing the spelling traces straight back to plain 'case' is the simplest guard against the tempting but wrong 'caseing'.

How the word is built

• case (container, box)
• -ing (noun-forming suffix)