Coding

How to spell coding

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce coding

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does coding mean?

1. nounThe activity of writing instructions in a programming language so a computer can run them.
2. nounThe process of assigning standard reference symbols or categories to records, such as in medical or administrative systems.

Coding in a sentence

• She spends her evenings coding small apps for fun.

• Accurate coding of each diagnosis ensures the hospital is paid correctly.

• The bootcamp teaches coding to people changing careers.

• Colour coding of the files made the archive much easier to search.

Where does coding come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word grows from 'code', which English took from the Old French 'code' and ultimately from the Latin 'codex', a word that originally meant the trunk of a tree and then a block of wood split into writing tablets. Because Roman scribes bound such tablets together, 'codex' came to mean a book or, more specifically, a systematic body of laws, which is why we still speak of a legal code. By the nineteenth century 'code' had widened to mean any system of signals or symbols, including secret ciphers and telegraph signals. The '-ing' form 'coding' names the activity of writing or applying such a system, and in the twentieth century it attached firmly to computer programming as instructions are turned into machine-readable symbols. The single silent 'e' of 'code' is dropped before '-ing', which is the small spelling habit worth remembering here.

How the word is built

• cod- (from code: a system of symbols)
• -ing (verb/noun suffix marking ongoing action)