Ditching

How to spell ditching

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce ditching

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does ditching mean?

1. verbGetting rid of, abandoning, or discarding something or someone, usually abruptly.
2. verbBringing an aircraft down for an emergency landing on water.
3. verbDigging, clearing, or repairing drainage trenches.

Ditching in a sentence

• The company is ditching its old expenses software in favour of a cheaper system.

• The pilot trained for ditching the plane safely on a calm stretch of water.

• The farmer spent the autumn ditching along the boundary to improve drainage.

• She felt guilty about ditching her friends to spend the weekend working.

• Survival drills cover what passengers should do when ditching over the sea.

• Heavy rain meant the crew was ditching beside the road for most of the week.

Where does ditching come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word grows from the Old English noun dic, which meant a trench dug into the ground, and it shares a single ancestor with the word 'dyke' or 'dike', the bank of earth thrown up beside such a trench. In early use the two ideas, the hollow you dig out and the mound you pile up, were barely separated, which is why related Germanic forms could mean either. From the noun came the verb 'to ditch', first in the literal sense of digging or repairing drainage channels, and the present participle 'ditching' simply names that ongoing action. By the early twentieth century the verb had picked up a vivid figurative sense, to throw something into a ditch and so abandon it, and pilots later borrowed it again for bringing a stricken aircraft down onto water. The spelling stays straightforward: the base 'ditch' keeps its 'tch', and you simply add '-ing' without doubling.

How the word is built

• ditch (from Old English dic: a trench or embankment)
• -ing (verbal/gerund suffix)