Dredging

How to spell dredging

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce dredging

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does dredging mean?

1. verbThe act of scooping mud, silt, or debris from the bottom of a river, harbour, or channel to deepen or clear it.
2. verbThe act of lightly coating food, such as meat or fish, in flour or another dry powder before cooking.

Dredging in a sentence

• The port authority spent millions dredging the harbour so larger ships could dock.

• Dredging the chicken in seasoned flour gives it a crisp golden crust.

• Dredging the canal removed decades of accumulated silt.

• The recipe calls for dredging each fillet in cornmeal before frying.

Where does dredging come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The waterway sense of dredge traces to Scots and northern English dialect, where a 'dreg-boat' was a vessel that dragged a net or scoop along a riverbed, and the word is closely tied to the idea of dragging, sharing roots with the Germanic verb to drag. From the late 1500s the verb dredge came to mean clearing or deepening a channel by scooping mud and silt from the bottom. The cooking sense has a separate ancestry: it comes from the Middle English 'dragge', a mixture of sweetmeats or spices, taken from Old French 'dragie' (a sugared sweet, the ancestor of the modern 'dragee'), and by the 1600s 'to dredge' meant to sprinkle or coat food with a powder such as flour. The two distinct origins happened to settle on the same spelling, so the soft 'dge' that you can hear at the end is the part to watch. When you add -ing the silent final e of dredge simply drops, giving dredging rather than 'dredgeing'.

How the word is built

• dredge (to drag/scoop up; also to coat)
• -ing (present participle/gerund suffix)