Coughing

How to spell coughing

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce coughing

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does coughing mean?

1. verbForcing air out of the lungs with a sudden sharp sound, often because of irritation or illness.

Coughing in a sentence

• The patient kept coughing throughout the night.

• Dust in the old attic left her coughing for several minutes.

Where does coughing come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The word descends from the Middle English verb coughen, which was an imitative or echoic creation: it mimicked the harsh, throaty sound of the action itself. It is related to similar words in neighbouring Germanic languages, such as the Dutch kuchen and the German keuchen, all of them rooted in the same noisy imitation of clearing the throat. The puzzling spelling comes from Old and Middle English, when the letters 'gh' stood for a real guttural sound at the back of the throat, much like the 'ch' in the Scottish 'loch'. Over the centuries English speakers stopped pronouncing that throaty consonant, but the 'gh' stayed frozen in the spelling, and here it ended up sounding like 'f'. That mismatch is exactly why 'coughing' traps writers: the 'ough' looks nothing like the 'off' sound it now produces.

How the word is built

• cough (to expel air noisily from the lungs)
• -ing (present participle/gerund suffix)