Confronting

How to spell confronting

11 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce confronting

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does confronting mean?

1. verbFacing up to or dealing directly with a person, problem, or difficult situation.

Confronting in a sentence

• Confronting the overdue invoices took her most of the afternoon.

• He kept confronting his manager about the unfair rota.

Where does confronting come from?

Language of origin: French

This is the present participle of the verb 'confront', which English took from the Old French 'confronter', meaning to set face to face or to share a common border. That French verb rested on the Medieval Latin 'confrontare', built from 'con-' (together) and 'frons', the Latin word for the forehead or the face, the same root that gives us 'front' and 'frontier'. The literal idea was of two parties placing their faces opposite one another, which is why to confront something is to meet it face to face. English adopted the verb in the 1500s, originally meaning to stand at a boundary with or to bring people face to face, and only later took on the sense of challenging or opposing. The adjective use, meaning something that is distressing or hard to face, became especially common in Australian and British usage during the twentieth century, drawing directly on that image of standing face to face with something uncomfortable.

How the word is built

• con- (together, against)
• front (forehead, face, from Latin frons)
• -ing (present participle / adjectival suffix)