Excluding

How to spell excluding

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce excluding

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does excluding mean?

1. prepositionNot including; leaving out of consideration or count.
2. verbPresent participle of exclude: shutting out or barring from a group or activity.

Excluding in a sentence

• preposition

  The room sleeps four people, excluding the baby.

• verb

  The committee was accused of excluding junior staff from key decisions.

• preposition

  The total comes to ninety pounds, excluding delivery.

• verb

  The new policy risks excluding low-income families from the scheme.

Where does excluding come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word descends from the Latin verb excludere, meaning 'to shut out' or 'to keep out', which was built from the prefix ex- ('out') and claudere ('to close or shut'). The same claudere root, meaning to close, sits at the heart of a whole family of English words, including 'close', 'conclude', 'include' and 'recluse', so the spelling pattern '-clude' recurs in many relatives. English took the verb 'exclude' in the fifteenth century, and the present participle 'excluding' came to function as a preposition meaning 'leaving out' or 'not counting'. The trap in the spelling is the single 'c' after 'ex' followed by 'lud', since writers sometimes expect a doubled letter that is not there. Remembering the partner word 'including' helps anchor both spelling and meaning.

How the word is built

• ex- (out)
• clud (from claudere: to close/shut)
• -ing (participle/preposition suffix)