Cleaning

How to spell cleaning

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce cleaning

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does cleaning mean?

1. nounThe activity or process of making something free from dirt and mess.
2. verbThe present participle of 'clean': in the act of removing dirt or mess.

Cleaning in a sentence

• noun

  The spring cleaning took most of the weekend.

• verb

  She spent the morning cleaning the kitchen before the guests arrived.

• noun

  A professional cleaning service comes to the office every evening.

• verb

  He was cleaning his boots on the step when the phone rang.

Where does cleaning come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word grows directly from the adjective 'clean', which descends from the Old English 'clǣne', meaning 'pure, clear, or free from dirt'. That word belonged to the wider Germanic family, with close relatives in Old Frisian and Old High German, and originally carried a broader sense of moral and physical purity as well as plain tidiness. The verb 'to clean' developed naturally from the adjective, and adding the productive '-ing' ending gave both the action noun ('the cleaning') and the ongoing-action participle ('she is cleaning'). The spelling stays refreshingly regular: the silent final 'e' of 'clean' is not present to drop, so you simply add '-ing' with no doubling or trickery. The same '-ing' machinery that builds 'cleaning' also builds thousands of other English verb forms, which is why it feels so familiar.

How the word is built

• clean (root: free from dirt)
• -ing (suffix forming a gerund noun or present participle)