Drooling

How to spell drooling

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce drooling

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does drooling mean?

1. verbLetting saliva run uncontrollably from the mouth.
2. verbShowing obvious, eager longing for something.

Drooling in a sentence

• The sleeping baby was drooling onto the pillow.

• The collectors were drooling over the rare car at the auction.

• The old dog kept drooling while it waited for its dinner.

• Shoppers stood drooling in front of the bakery window.

Where does drooling come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word is the present participle of 'drool', which arose in American English in the mid-1800s as an altered, shortened form of the older verb 'drivel'. 'Drivel' itself descends from the Old English 'dreflian', meaning to let saliva or mucus run from the mouth, and it long carried the double sense of dribbling spit and talking nonsense. As 'drivel' specialised toward the 'nonsense' meaning, 'drool' stepped in to carry the literal salivating sense, smoothing the awkward middle consonants into a simple long 'oo' sound. The spelling keeps that doubled 'o' to mark the long vowel, the same pattern seen in 'pool', 'tool', and 'spool'. Figuratively, by the early 1900s 'drooling' had also come to describe showing eager, almost greedy desire for something, an extension of the image of a hungry mouth watering.

How the word is built

• drool (to let saliva run from the mouth)
• -ing (present participle suffix)