Disappearing

How to spell disappearing

12 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce disappearing

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does disappearing mean?

1. verbPassing out of sight or ceasing to exist; the act of vanishing.

Disappearing in a sentence

• The magician kept disappearing behind the velvet curtain during the show.

• The company noticed money was slowly disappearing from the petty cash drawer.

Where does disappearing come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is the present participle of the verb 'disappear', which was assembled in English around the late 1400s from the prefix 'dis-', meaning 'away' or signalling reversal, attached to the verb 'appear'. 'Appear' itself came through Old French 'aparoir' from the Latin 'apparere', literally 'to come into view' or 'to become visible', built on 'parere', meaning 'to come forth' or 'to show'. So to disappear is, quite logically, to do the opposite of coming into view: to pass out of sight. The spelling trap lives entirely at the seam where the parts meet, because 'dis-' ends in a single 's' and 'appear' opens with a single 'a' but a doubled 'p', producing the much-misspelled run of one 's' and two 'p's. Remembering that the word is simply 'dis' plus the familiar word 'appear' is the surest guard against writing 'dissapear' or 'disapear'.

How the word is built

• dis- (away, reversal)
• appear (root, from Latin apparere: to come into view)
• -ing (present participle suffix)