Dreaming

How to spell dreaming

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce dreaming

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does dreaming mean?

1. verbExperiencing images and thoughts during sleep, or imagining something deeply desired.

Dreaming in a sentence

• She spent the whole flight dreaming about her new apartment.

• He kept dreaming of the same hallway night after night.

Where does dreaming come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The base word comes from Old English, where 'dream' actually meant 'joy, mirth, music, or revelry' rather than anything to do with sleep. The familiar modern sense of images seen while asleep seems to have grown from a shared Germanic root, and scholars suspect Old Norse 'draumr' and related Norse and Dutch words helped push the English word toward its 'sleeping vision' meaning during the Middle Ages. The two strands of meaning sat side by side for a long time before the sleep sense won out. The form 'dreaming' simply adds the ordinary '-ing' ending to that root. The spelling trap is the 'ea' digraph, which represents a single long 'ee' sound yet keeps both vowels on the page, exactly as in 'cream' and 'steam'.

How the word is built

• dream (root: a series of images during sleep, or a cherished hope)
• -ing (present participle/gerund suffix)