Ceiling

How to spell ceiling

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce ceiling

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does ceiling mean?

1. nounThe upper interior surface of a room, opposite the floor.
2. nounAn upper limit set on something such as a price, wage, or amount.

Ceiling in a sentence

• A damp patch spread across the bedroom ceiling.

• The council imposed a ceiling on rents in the city centre.

• The decorator painted the ceiling a soft cream before starting the walls.

• Interest on the savings account is fixed below a strict ceiling.

Where does ceiling come from?

Language of origin: Latin

Ceiling grew out of the now-rare verb 'ceil', spelled 'celen' in late Middle English, which meant to line or panel the inside of a room, especially the underside of a roof. The origin of that verb is genuinely tangled, and scholars are not certain which thread is the true one. The most attractive idea links it to the Latin caelum, meaning 'sky' or 'heaven', by way of the French ciel, also 'sky', which would make a ceiling literally the indoor sky overhead. A rival explanation connects it to the Latin caelare, meaning 'to carve' or 'to engrave', since early panelled ceilings were often elaborately worked. By the 1500s the noun ceiling had settled into its modern sense of the overhead surface of a room, and the 'ei' spelling is precisely the trap, since it sounds identical to its homophone 'sealing' yet keeps the 'cei' cluster.

How the word is built

• ceil- (to line or panel a room's interior)
• -ing (noun-forming suffix)

Words that sound like ceiling

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• sealing: Closing something firmly so that air, water, or contents cannot pass; the present participle and gerund of 'seal'.