Dining

How to spell dining

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce dining

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does dining mean?

1. verbEating dinner or a formal meal, especially in a particular place or manner.

Dining in a sentence

• The apartment came with a spacious dining room overlooking the garden.

• The couple enjoyed dining by candlelight on their anniversary.

Where does dining come from?

Language of origin: French

The word traces back to the verb 'dine', which English took from the Old French 'disner', meaning 'to take a meal'. That French word is thought to descend from an unrecorded Late Latin form 'disieiunare', literally 'to break one's fast', built from 'dis-' (undo, reverse) and 'ieiunium' (a fast or abstinence from food). The same Latin root for fasting also lies behind the modern words 'jejune' and, by a separate path, 'breakfast' in meaning. 'Dine' entered English in the 1200s, and the spelling 'dining' is simply the verb's gerund, formed by dropping the silent 'e' and adding '-ing'. Because the long 'i' sound is held by that vanished 'e' rather than by a doubled consonant, the word keeps a single 'n'; writers who double it (the mistaken 'dinning') accidentally spell a quite different word meaning a loud, continuous noise.

How the word is built

• dine (to eat a meal)
• -ing (present participle/gerund suffix; silent e of 'dine' dropped before the suffix)