Drilling

How to spell drilling

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce drilling

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does drilling mean?

1. nounThe act of boring a hole into a hard material with a rotating tool, or extracting oil or gas from underground.
2. nounThe act of teaching or rehearsing something through repeated, disciplined exercises.

Drilling in a sentence

• The drilling noise from the building site kept the whole office awake.

• The sergeant's relentless drilling turned the new recruits into a sharp unit.

• The company secured a licence for offshore drilling in the North Sea.

• Hours of drilling on multiplication tables finally paid off for the class.

Where does drilling come from?

Language of origin: Dutch

The base word 'drill' came into English in the early 1600s from the Dutch verb 'drillen', which meant 'to bore a hole', 'to turn round', and also 'to put soldiers through repeated training exercises'. That cluster of meanings explains why a single English word covers both boring through wood or rock and putting people through repeated practice. The form 'drilling' is simply the verbal noun or present participle, built by adding the ordinary '-ing' ending. The spelling keeps the doubled 'l' because the base 'drill' already ends in two l's, so no letter is added or dropped when the suffix attaches. The Dutch sense of military 'drilling' spread through English in the era of organised European armies, while the oil and mining sense of 'drilling' grew much later with industrial machinery.

How the word is built

• drill (to bore or train, from Dutch drillen)
• -ing (forming a verbal noun or present participle)