Chipping

How to spell chipping

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce chipping

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does chipping mean?

1. verbBreaking or cutting small fragments off a hard surface or object.
2. verbPlaying a short, low golf shot that lifts the ball briefly and lets it roll toward the hole.
3. verbImplanting a small electronic identification chip under an animal's skin.

Chipping in a sentence

• The old paint is chipping off the window frame.

• She spent the afternoon chipping balls onto the practice green.

• The vet recommended chipping the puppy before its first walk.

• Frost was slowly chipping away at the stone steps.

• Good chipping from the edge of the green saved his round.

• Chipping a cat makes it far easier to reunite owners with strays.

Where does chipping come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The base word 'chip' descends from Old English, where 'cipp' meant a small piece of wood and the related verb meant 'to cut' or 'to hew'. This is a Germanic root, with cousins in other old European languages that all carried the sense of cutting away a small fragment from something larger. Over the centuries the meaning broadened from woodworking to any hard material, so a stone, a tooth, or a coat of paint could lose a 'chip'. The present-participle form 'chipping' adds the ordinary verbal ending '-ing', and because 'chip' ends in a single consonant after one short stressed vowel, the p is doubled before the suffix: that doubling is the small spelling trap, since a single p would wrongly suggest a long vowel as in 'chiping'. In the twentieth century the word picked up specialised uses in golf and, more recently, in fitting electronic identity chips to pets.

How the word is built

• chip (a small fragment cut or broken off, from Old English cipp)
• -ing (verbal/gerund suffix); the final p doubles after a short stressed vowel