Disclosing

How to spell disclosing

10 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce disclosing

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does disclosing mean?

1. verbMaking secret or previously unknown information known to others.

Disclosing in a sentence

• The company faces a fine for not disclosing the safety risk to customers.

• By disclosing her salary, she helped colleagues negotiate fairer pay.

Where does disclosing come from?

Language of origin: French

The word grows from the verb 'disclose', which English took from the Old French 'desclore', meaning 'to open up' or 'unclose'. That French verb was built from the Latin prefix 'dis-', signalling reversal or undoing, joined to 'claudere', meaning 'to shut' or 'to close'; so the literal sense was 'to unshut', to open what had been closed. When it entered English in the 1300s it first described the simple act of opening a physical thing, like a bud opening or a door swung wide. Over the following centuries the meaning drifted from opening objects to opening up information, that is, revealing facts that had been kept hidden. The same 'claudere' root sits inside everyday relatives such as 'close', 'enclose', and 'conclude', and noticing the buried word 'close' is a handy reminder of how the spelling is built. The '-ing' ending then simply turns the verb into its ongoing or noun-like form.

How the word is built

• dis- (reversal, undoing)
• close (to shut, from Latin claudere)
• -ing (present participle/gerund)