Curling
nounA team sport played on ice in which players slide heavy polished stones toward a target while teammates sweep the ice ahead of them.
How to spell curling
7 letters · 2 syllables
How to pronounce curling
Say the part in capitals loudest.
What does curling mean?
- nounA team sport played on ice in which players slide heavy polished stones toward a target while teammates sweep the ice ahead of them.
- verbThe act of twisting or coiling something, such as hair, into rings or curves.
Curling in a sentence
-
noun
Curling is one of the most popular winter sports in Canada.
-
verb
She spent the morning curling her hair before the wedding.
-
noun
The local club offers curling lessons every weekend through the winter.
-
verb
The heat was curling the edges of the old photographs.
Where does curling come from?
Language of origin: Germanic
The base verb 'curl' goes back to a Middle English form 'crullen', meaning 'to coil into ringlets', which came from an earlier adjective 'crulle' meaning 'curly'. That adjective was borrowed from Middle Dutch 'krul', describing a curl of hair, and is rooted in a Germanic family of words for twisting and coiling. Over time the letters in the cluster were swapped (a process called metathesis), so 'crul-' settled into the modern 'curl' we write today. As a sport, 'curling' is a Scottish coinage first recorded in the 1600s, named for the curving, gently bending path the polished stone follows as it slides across the ice. The same root sense of bending and coiling unites the hair, the sport, and any other curving motion, which makes the plain '-ing' spelling easy once you see it is simply 'curl' plus the ending.
How the word is built
- curl (to coil or twist into rings)
- -ing (gerund/participle suffix)
Fix your spelling for good.
Spelling Garden finds the words you personally get wrong, plants them in a garden, and brings each one back just before you would have forgotten it.
Just five minutes a day is all it takes to fix your spelling.