Crowding

How to spell crowding

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce crowding

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does crowding mean?

1. verbGathering or pressing closely together in a way that fills a space.

Crowding in a sentence

• The commuters kept crowding onto the small platform.

• Too many icons crowding the screen made the layout confusing.

Where does crowding come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The word comes from the Old English verb 'crudan', which meant 'to press' or 'to push forward', and which described a hard physical shoving rather than a gathering of people. Over time the noun 'crowd' emerged to mean a dense mass of people pressed together, and the meaning broadened to any tight assembly. The form 'crowding' is the present participle and verbal noun, built simply by adding the productive '-ing' ending. The same Germanic root survives in related words for pushing and pressing, and the original sense of physical pressure still echoes whenever something feels overcrowded. The spelling is straightforward, but the silent 'w' after the 'o' is the one feature that occasionally trips writers, since the sound it represents blends into the vowel.

How the word is built

• crowd (a large gathering)
• -ing (verb/noun suffix)