Docking

How to spell docking

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce docking

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does docking mean?

1. verbBringing a ship or boat alongside a dock or into a berth.
2. verbJoining one spacecraft to another in orbit.
3. verbTaking an amount away from someone's wages or score.

Docking in a sentence

• The captain began docking the ferry as passengers gathered near the gangway.

• The crew spent weeks rehearsing docking the capsule with the space station.

• The manager warned that docking wages for being a minute late was unfair.

• Docking a large yacht in a strong crosswind takes real skill.

• A software fault delayed docking with the orbiting laboratory.

• The contract said nothing about docking a worker's holiday pay.

Where does docking come from?

Language of origin: Dutch

The core word 'dock' arrived in English in the early 1500s from Middle Dutch and Middle Low German 'docke', a word for the channel or hollow where a ship sits when it is moored or repaired; the seafaring trade between the Low Countries and England carried the term across the North Sea. Adding the ordinary English ending '-ing' turns it into the action of bringing a vessel to its berth, a sense later stretched to spacecraft joining together in orbit and to electronic devices connecting to a base. A quite separate older 'dock' lies behind the tail sense: Middle English 'dok' meant the fleshy, solid part of an animal's tail, a Germanic word, and 'to dock' came to mean cutting that part short. From the idea of cutting short came the figurative 'docking' of someone's wages, that is, trimming an amount away. Because both roots ended up spelled identically, the single form 'docking' now serves these distinct ideas, and the spelling itself is refreshingly regular: just 'dock' plus '-ing'.

How the word is built

• dock (a ship's berth, or to cut short)
• -ing (present participle / gerund suffix)