Dismissing

How to spell dismissing

10 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce dismissing

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does dismissing mean?

1. verbSending someone away, discharging them from a role, or refusing to take an idea or concern seriously.

Dismissing in a sentence

• After dismissing the class early, the teacher tidied the room.

• The manager regretted dismissing such a reliable employee.

Where does dismissing come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word descends from the Latin verb dimittere, formed from dis- meaning 'apart' or 'away' and mittere meaning 'to send', so the literal idea was 'to send away'. Medieval Latin reshaped the spelling toward dismittere, which stressed the prefix dis-, and English took it up in the fifteenth century, first in the sense of letting a person go or sending them off. From there the meaning broadened to cover discharging someone from a job and, more abstractly, brushing aside an idea or a worry as unworthy of attention. The same mittere root, which means 'to send', also gave English a large family of relatives such as 'mission', 'transmit', 'permit', and 'submit', and recognising that shared core helps explain the double 's' in dismiss: the prefix dis- meets the root, and the suffix -ing simply rides along on the doubled consonant. The trap in spelling is remembering both the single 's' of dis- and the double 's' that opens the root.

How the word is built

• dis- (away, apart)
• miss (from Latin mittere: to send)
• -ing (present participle suffix)