Emitting

How to spell emitting

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce emitting

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does emitting mean?

1. verbSending out or giving off something such as light, heat, sound, gas or radiation.

Emitting in a sentence

• The old engine was emitting thick black smoke into the yard.

• The factory kept emitting fumes well past midnight.

Where does emitting come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is the present participle of the verb 'emit', which English took from the Latin emittere, meaning 'to send out' or 'to let go'. That verb was built from the prefix ex- 'out' (here trimmed to e- before the consonant) and the verb mittere 'to send', one of the most productive roots in the language. The same mittere lies behind a whole family of familiar English words, including 'mission', 'transmit', 'permit' and 'submit', all of which carry some flavour of sending or letting through. English adopted 'emit' in the early 1600s, first in the sense of sending something out into the open such as light, sound or vapour. The spelling trap lives in the inflected form: because the stress falls on the second syllable and that syllable ends in a single vowel plus t, the t doubles before -ing, giving 'emitting' with one m but two t's.

How the word is built

• e- (variant of ex-: out)
• mit (from mittere: to send)
• -ting (present participle, with the final t doubled after a stressed short vowel)