Dwelling

How to spell dwelling

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce dwelling

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does dwelling mean?

1. nounA house, flat, or other place where a person lives.
2. verbContinuing to think, speak, or focus on something for a long time; present participle of dwell.

Dwelling in a sentence

• noun

  The survey valued each dwelling in the new development.

• verb

  She kept dwelling on the mistake instead of moving forward.

• noun

  The planning rules limit how many people may occupy a single dwelling.

• verb

  The report spent too long dwelling on minor details.

Where does dwelling come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word grows from the Old English verb dwellan, whose earliest recorded sense was surprisingly negative: it meant 'to lead astray, to hinder, or to delay'. That root belongs to the Germanic family, and related forms in Old Norse (dvelja, 'to delay') and Middle Dutch carried similar ideas of holding someone back or causing them to linger. Over the medieval period the meaning softened from 'to delay' to 'to linger in a place' and finally to 'to remain or live somewhere', which is the sense we keep today. The noun 'dwelling', formed by adding the -ing ending to the verb, came to mean the place where a person lives, and survives most strongly now in legal and formal contexts such as 'dwelling house'. The double l in the spelling reflects the original dwellan and is the main thing to remember: keep two of them, exactly as in 'spell' and 'tell'.

How the word is built

• dwell (Old English dwellan: to live, remain)
• -ing (noun/gerund suffix)