Fasting

How to spell fasting

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce fasting

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does fasting mean?

1. nounThe practice of going without food, or some kinds of food, for a set period.
2. verbPresent participle of fast: currently going without food.

Fasting in a sentence

• noun

  The clinic asked for a blood sample after twelve hours of fasting.

• verb

  She was fasting before the morning surgery and felt slightly faint.

• noun

  Many cultures observe a period of fasting for religious reasons.

• verb

  The patients who were fasting overnight gave the most reliable test results.

Where does fasting come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word goes back to the Old English verb fæstan, meaning 'to fast' or 'to abstain from food', which came from a Proto-Germanic source shared with German fasten and Old Norse fasta. The same family gave English the adjective 'fast' in the sense of 'firm' or 'fixed', and the link is more than coincidence: to fast originally carried the idea of holding firmly to a religious observance, so a person who kept the fast was holding fast to a rule. The food sense had become established by the time of early English Christianity, when seasons of fasting were a fixed part of the calendar. The form 'fasting' is simply the verb with the ordinary -ing ending, used both as the action noun (the practice) and as the present participle. Because the spelling follows the plain word plus a regular suffix, there is no silent letter or doubled consonant to trip a writer.

How the word is built

• fast (Old English fæstan: to abstain from food)
• -ing (forming a gerund or present participle)