Dwindling

How to spell dwindling

9 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce dwindling

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does dwindling mean?

1. adjectiveGradually becoming smaller in size, amount, or number.

Dwindling in a sentence

• The company tried to reverse its dwindling profits with a new product line.

• A dwindling supply of clean water worried the entire region.

Where does dwindling come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word comes from 'dwindle', a verb that first appears in English around the late 1500s and was popularised in writing by Shakespeare. 'Dwindle' itself is a frequentative form of the older verb 'dwine', meaning to waste away or fade, which descends from the Old English 'dwinan', literally 'to languish, to dwindle, to vanish'. The frequentative ending suggested a steady, repeated wasting away rather than a single event, which is exactly the sense of gradual shrinking we still use today. The same Germanic root survives in related northern dialect and Old Norse words for fading or pining. When you add the present-participle ending, you get 'dwindling', and the spelling trap is the silent-feeling cluster 'dwin' followed by 'dl', where the 'e' of 'dwindle' is dropped before '-ing'.

How the word is built

• dwindl- (from dwindle: to shrink or waste away)
• -ing (present participle / adjectival suffix)