Ducking

How to spell ducking

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce ducking

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does ducking mean?

1. verbLowering the head or body quickly to avoid something, or moving aside to dodge a blow or obstacle.
2. verbAvoiding a responsibility, question, or unpleasant task that one is expected to face.
3. verbPlunging or dipping something or someone briefly under water.

Ducking in a sentence

• He kept ducking behind the parked cars so the security guard would not spot him.

• The minister was accused of ducking the difficult questions at the press conference.

• The children spent the afternoon ducking each other in the shallow end of the pool.

• She walked through the old cottage ducking under every low beam.

• He has been ducking his share of the household chores for weeks.

• She was ducking the dirty brushes in a bucket to rinse off the paint.

Where does ducking come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the present participle of the verb 'duck', which goes back to a Germanic root meaning 'to dive' or 'to plunge under', reconstructed as something like duukan. The verb is closely tied to the bird of the same name: the waterfowl was called a 'duck' precisely because of its habit of diving and dipping beneath the surface, so the action named the creature rather than the other way round. By the medieval period the verb had broadened in English to mean lowering the head or body quickly, as if dipping down to avoid a blow, and from there it grew the figurative sense of dodging a duty or a question. The plain spelling holds no real trap: the base 'duck' simply takes -ing, with the 'ck' staying put because the word already ends in that cluster. Related dialect words for diving and bending survive across the Germanic languages, including the Dutch duiken, 'to dive'.

How the word is built

• duck (verb: to dive, dip, or dodge)
• -ing (present participle suffix)