Digging

How to spell digging

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce digging

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does digging mean?

1. verbBreaking up, turning over, or removing earth or other material, typically with a tool or machine.

Digging in a sentence

• The crew spent all morning digging a trench for the new pipe.

• She enjoys digging the vegetable beds before the spring planting.

Where does digging come from?

Language of origin: French

This is the present participle of the verb 'dig', a word that surfaced in Middle English around the 1300s and whose deeper origins are not entirely settled. The most likely source is Old French 'diguer', meaning 'to make a dyke or ditch', which in turn ties back to a Germanic word for a bank or embankment, the same family that gives us 'dyke' and 'ditch'. Because the base verb 'dig' ends in a single short vowel followed by a single consonant, English doubles that final 'g' before adding '-ing', which is exactly the spelling trap here: the word is 'digging' with two g's, not 'diging'. The same doubling rule shapes related forms like 'digger' and 'dug'. Over time the literal sense of turning over soil broadened into figurative uses such as 'digging for information', though the spelling pattern stayed firmly fixed.

How the word is built

• dig (to break or turn up earth)
• -g- (doubled consonant)
• -ing (present participle/gerund suffix)