Concentrating

How to spell concentrating

13 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce concentrating

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does concentrating mean?

1. verbDirecting all of one's attention or mental effort toward a single task or subject.
2. verbBringing or gathering people, resources, or substances together into one place or a denser form.

Concentrating in a sentence

• She found it hard concentrating on the report with the radio playing.

• The factory was concentrating all its production at a single site to cut costs.

• He was concentrating so deeply that he missed the phone ringing.

• The process works by concentrating the juice until most of the water is removed.

Where does concentrating come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word grows from the Latin centrum, meaning 'the fixed point of a circle', which Latin itself had borrowed from the Greek kentron, the sharp point of a compass or a goad. In the 1600s European scholars built the verb 'concentrate' by adding the prefix con-, meaning 'together', to give the literal sense of drawing things toward a common centre. The earliest English uses were technical, describing how chemists reduced a solution to make it stronger or more dense by removing water. From that idea of gathering material into one tight point came the figurative meaning of gathering all of one's attention onto a single task. The present participle 'concentrating' simply adds -ing, and the spelling trap lives in that middle stretch, where the silent flow of con-cen-tra hides a single c and a single t before the final -ting.

How the word is built

• con- (together)
• centr (centre/point)
• -ate (verb)
• -ing (present participle)