Dipping

How to spell dipping

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce dipping

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does dipping mean?

1. verbBriefly immersing something in a liquid, or moving or sloping downward.

Dipping in a sentence

• She enjoyed dipping the bread into the warm soup.

• The road kept dipping and rising across the moorland.

Where does dipping come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the present participle of the verb 'dip', which comes from the Old English 'dyppan', meaning to plunge or immerse something briefly in a liquid. That verb belongs to the same Germanic family as 'deep' and 'deop', the shared idea being something going down into water. Over the centuries the sense broadened from immersing cloth or bread in liquid to any quick downward movement, such as a road dipping or a price dipping. The doubled 'p' in 'dipping' follows the regular English spelling rule: a single short vowel in a stressed syllable doubles the final consonant before '-ing', which is also why we write 'dipped' rather than 'diped'. Recognising that rule is the key to spelling it, since the base word 'dip' has only one 'p'.

How the word is built

• dip (to plunge briefly)
• -p- (doubled consonant after a short stressed vowel)
• -ing (present participle/gerund)