Cracking

How to spell cracking

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce cracking

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does cracking mean?

1. verbPresent participle of crack: breaking or splitting apart, often with a sharp sound.
2. adjectiveBritish informal term for excellent, first-rate, or very good.
3. nounThe industrial process of breaking large hydrocarbon molecules into smaller ones, used in oil refining.

Cracking in a sentence

• verb

  The old plaster ceiling was cracking under the weight of the leaking water.

• adjective

  The team set off at a cracking pace and finished the route well ahead of schedule.

• noun

  The refinery uses catalytic cracking to convert heavy oil into petrol.

• verb

  She heard the ice cracking as she stepped onto the frozen pond.

• adjective

  Everyone agreed the new restaurant served a cracking Sunday roast.

• noun

  Engineers monitored the temperature closely during the cracking stage of production.

Where does cracking come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The base verb 'crack' descends from the Old English 'cracian', meaning 'to make a sharp, sudden noise' or 'to resound', a word that imitates the very sound it describes. Over the centuries the sense widened from the noise of breaking to the act of breaking or splitting itself, so that something cracked was something that had snapped apart with a sharp report. The present participle form 'cracking' adds the ordinary '-ing' ending and serves both as a verb form and as a noun for the process. In British and Irish speech a lively informal sense grew up in the nineteenth century, in which 'cracking' came to mean excellent or first-rate, as in a cracking pace or a cracking good story. A separate technical use arose in the petroleum industry, where 'cracking' names the process of breaking large hydrocarbon molecules into smaller, more useful ones. The spelling keeps the doubled 'ck' and adds '-ing' cleanly, so the main thing to remember is the single 'ing' after the hard 'ck'.

How the word is built

• crack (to break or split)
• -ing (present participle / gerund suffix)