Cheating

How to spell cheating

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce cheating

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does cheating mean?

1. nounThe act of acting dishonestly or unfairly in order to gain an advantage, especially in a test, game, or contest.
2. nounThe act of being unfaithful to a romantic partner.

Cheating in a sentence

• The exam board disqualified two students for cheating during the test.

• She suspected her husband of cheating after finding the messages.

• Using a hidden phone in a quiz counts as cheating.

• The couple separated because of his cheating.

Where does cheating come from?

Language of origin: French

Cheating comes from the verb 'cheat', which began life as a shortened form of the Middle English word 'escheten', meaning to confiscate property. That in turn came through Old French 'escheoir', meaning 'to fall to' or 'to befall', from Latin 'excadere', literally 'to fall out', built from 'ex' (out) and 'cadere' (to fall). The legal sense involved an 'escheat', the reversion of land to a lord or the crown when an owner died without heirs, and officers who handled such seizures gained a reputation for dishonest grabbing. By the sixteenth century the clipped form 'cheat' had drifted to mean defrauding or deceiving someone for gain, and adding the familiar '-ing' suffix produced the noun and participle we use today. The single 'e' followed by the long vowel and a single 't' is the spelling point worth fixing in memory: it is 'cheat' plus 'ing', never a doubled letter.

How the word is built

• cheat (to deceive or defraud)
• -ing (verbal/noun suffix)