Coaching

How to spell coaching

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce coaching

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does coaching mean?

1. nounThe activity of training or guiding a person to improve a skill or reach a goal.
2. verbPresent participle of coach: actively training or guiding someone.

Coaching in a sentence

• noun

  The firm hired a consultant to provide coaching for new managers.

• verb

  She spent the afternoon coaching the junior staff through the new software.

• noun

  Her tennis improved quickly after a season of intensive coaching.

• verb

  He is coaching the local under-twelve football team this term.

Where does coaching come from?

Language of origin: Other

The word traces back to the Hungarian kocsi, a kind of large carriage named after the town of Kocs, where such vehicles were first built in the 1500s. It travelled into English through French (coche) and German, and by the 1550s a coach simply meant a horse-drawn carriage. The figurative training sense was born in Oxford University slang around the 1830s: a private tutor who 'carried' a student through demanding examinations was jokingly called a coach, much as a carriage carries a passenger. From that playful image came the modern verb to coach and the noun coaching, covering athletic, academic, and professional instruction. The spelling preserves the soft 'oa' vowel and the 'ch' that English inherited along the journey, so the trap is simply remembering the silent-looking 'oa' rather than a single 'o'.

How the word is built

• coach (root, from kocsi: a carriage from the town Kocs)
• -ing (verbal/noun suffix)