Drinking

How to spell drinking

8 letters · 2 syllables

7 of the 177 people asked to spell drinking in Spelling Garden got it wrong the first time.

How to pronounce drinking

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does drinking mean?

1. verbThe present participle of drink: taking liquid into the mouth and swallowing it.
2. nounThe consumption of alcoholic drink, especially as a habit or social activity.
3. adjectiveRelating to or suitable for consumption as a beverage, or relating to the consumption of alcohol.

Drinking in a sentence

• verb

  Drinking plenty of water helps on a hot day.

• noun

  Heavy drinking over many years had damaged his liver.

• adjective

  The village had no safe drinking water until the new well was dug.

• verb

  She was drinking her coffee slowly while reading the report.

• noun

  The company introduced a strict policy on drinking during work hours.

• adjective

  The legal drinking age varies from one country to another.

Where does drinking come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word grows from the Old English verb drincan, which simply meant to swallow liquid, a word shared across the Germanic family with the Old Saxon drinkan and the Old High German trinkan. The base form has barely changed in over a thousand years, and the -ing ending here is the native English suffix that turns a verb into its present participle and into a gerund (a verb acting as a noun). By the medieval period 'drinking' had picked up its narrower social sense of consuming alcohol, which is why phrases like a heavy night of drinking still carry that flavour today. The spelling is mercifully regular: the silent letter trap that catches people in cousins like 'doubt' simply is not present here, since every sound in drinking is written out. The only point worth noting is the 'nk' cluster, where the n is pronounced as the ng sound, a quirk inherited straight from the old Germanic root.

How the word is built

• drink (Old English drincan: to swallow liquid)
• -ing (verb/noun suffix)