Etching

How to spell etching

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce etching

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does etching mean?

1. nounA print made from a metal plate into which a design has been bitten by acid, or the art of producing such prints.
2. verbThe act of cutting or corroding a design into a hard surface, especially with acid or a sharp tool.

Etching in a sentence

• noun

  The gallery displayed a delicate etching of the harbour at dawn.

• verb

  The workshop offers laser etching of names onto glass tumblers.

• noun

  She framed an original etching she had bought at the antique fair.

• verb

  The jeweller spent the afternoon etching a fine pattern into the silver lid.

Where does etching come from?

Language of origin: Dutch

The word traces back to the Dutch verb etsen, meaning 'to corrode' or literally 'to eat into', which Dutch in turn borrowed from the German atzen, 'to feed' or 'to cause to be eaten'. The underlying idea is that the artist coats a metal plate with a waxy ground, scratches a design through it, and then bathes the plate in acid, which 'eats' lines into the exposed metal so the plate can be inked and printed. English picked the term up in the early seventeenth century, when Dutch printmaking was at its height, so the spelling carries that borrowed Germanic flavour. The same biting, corroding sense survives in the everyday phrase 'etched in memory', where an impression is imagined as cut permanently into a surface. The unusual 'tch' cluster is simply the standard English way of writing the soft 'ch' sound after a short vowel, as in 'fetch' and 'catch'.

How the word is built

• etch (from Dutch etsen, to corrode with acid)
• -ing (noun/verbal suffix)