Designing

How to spell designing

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce designing

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does designing mean?

1. verbIn the process of planning and creating the form or structure of something.
2. adjectiveActing in a calculating, scheming way to further hidden self-interest.

Designing in a sentence

• verb

  She spent the weekend designing a new logo for the bakery.

• adjective

  The novel's designing villain manipulated everyone around him for money.

• verb

  The firm is designing a low-cost housing block for the city council.

• adjective

  Investors grew wary of the designing partner who quietly rewrote the contracts.

Where does designing come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word grows out of the verb 'design', which English took in the late 1500s from the Latin designare, meaning 'to mark out' or 'to point out'. That Latin verb was built from the prefix de-, here carrying the sense 'down' or 'out', joined to signum, meaning 'a mark' or 'a sign'. The route into English ran partly through Old French and Italian, where the same root also gave the artistic word 'design' for a drawn plan. The silent 'g', which makes the spelling a small trap, is a genuine inheritance from signum and survives in the related words 'sign', 'signal' and 'signature'. Alongside the everyday meaning of planning or creating, an older judgemental sense developed in the 1600s, in which a 'designing' person was someone with hidden, calculating intentions, much like our modern phrase 'to have designs on something'.

How the word is built

• de- (down, out)
• sign (mark, from Latin signum)
• -ing (verb/adjective suffix)