Deleting

How to spell deleting

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce deleting

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does deleting mean?

1. verbRemoving or erasing text, data, or files so that they no longer exist or appear.

Deleting in a sentence

• Deleting the duplicate photos freed up a lot of storage on her phone.

• He spent the morning deleting old emails from his cluttered inbox.

Where does deleting come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word descends from the Latin verb delere, meaning 'to wipe out', 'to destroy', or 'to blot out', which itself is thought to combine de- (an intensifying or 'away' element) with a root tied to lining out or smearing over written text. In ancient practice, deleting meant literally rubbing away marks scratched into wax tablets, so the idea of erasing the written word sat at its heart from the very beginning. English took up 'delete' in the 1400s, originally in the sense of striking text from a document, and the editorial instruction 'dele' (cross this out) survives as a printer's term. The modern computing sense, removing files or characters at the press of a key, grew naturally from that same notion of wiping written content away. The spelling keeps a single tidy 't' before the -ing, since the base verb 'delete' already ends in a silent 'e' that is dropped, which is exactly the point writers can stumble over.

How the word is built

• de- (away, from)
• lete (root from Latin delere: to wipe out)
• -ing (present participle suffix)