Fanning

How to spell fanning

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce fanning

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does fanning mean?

1. verbPresent participle of fan: stirring up a current of air to cool something, or spreading something out in a wide curved shape.

Fanning in a sentence

• She sat on the porch fanning herself with a folded magazine.

• The dealer kept fanning the cards across the green felt table.

Where does fanning come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The base word 'fan' comes from the Old English 'fann', which named a winnowing device used to toss grain into the air so that the lighter chaff blew away. That Old English word was itself borrowed early from the Latin 'vannus', meaning a winnowing basket or shovel, an everyday farm tool in the Roman world. Over time the sense shifted from separating grain to the simpler idea of stirring up a current of air, giving us the hand-held cooling fan and later the mechanical one. The verb 'to fan' grew naturally out of the noun, and its present participle 'fanning' follows the regular English rule of doubling the final consonant after a short stressed vowel, which is exactly the spelling trap here: one writes 'fanning', not 'faning'. The same doubling logic governs relatives such as 'running' and 'planning'.

How the word is built

• fan (root: a device or motion that moves air)
• -n- (consonant doubled after a short stressed vowel)
• -ing (present participle)