Dialing

How to spell dialing

7 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce dialing

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does dialing mean?

1. verbThe act of entering a telephone number or setting a dial or control.

Dialing in a sentence

• She kept dialing the wrong number because the area code had changed.

• After dialing the front desk, he waited several minutes for an answer.

Where does dialing come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The verb dial grew out of the noun dial, which English took in the late 1300s from Medieval Latin diale or dialis, meaning 'daily' or 'pertaining to a day', ultimately from the Latin dies, meaning 'day'. The earliest dials were sundials, plates whose markings tracked the movement of the day by the shadow of the sun, and the sense later spread to the marked face of a clock and then to any graduated plate or rotating disc on an instrument. When early telephones used a rotating disc to enter a number, the action of turning that disc became the verb 'to dial', and the word survived the move to push buttons and touchscreens. The American spelling keeps a single l in 'dialing' because American convention does not double a final l after an unstressed vowel, which is exactly the point where British and Canadian writers add a second l to make 'dialling'.

How the word is built

• dial (a graduated face or rotating disc, from Latin dies 'day')
• -ing (verb form)

British and American spelling

Dialing is the American spelling. British English spells it dialling.