Feeling

How to spell feeling

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce feeling

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does feeling mean?

1. nounAn emotional state or reaction, such as happiness, sadness, or anger.
2. nounA physical sensation perceived through the body, especially through touch.
3. nounA belief or opinion, often based on intuition rather than firm evidence.

Feeling in a sentence

• A warm feeling of relief spread through her after the exam.

• After the long flight she had no feeling in her legs.

• My general feeling is that the project will run over budget.

• He tried to hide his true feeling during the meeting.

• The dentist asked whether he still had feeling in the numbed tooth.

• She had a strong feeling that the deal would fall through.

Where does feeling come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word traces back to the Old English verb felan, meaning 'to touch' or 'to perceive', which in turn came from a Germanic root shared with the Dutch voelen and the German fuhlen, all carrying the sense of sensing something through the skin. The noun 'feeling' was formed by adding the suffix -ing, which in English turns a verb into a word naming the action or its result. Over the centuries the meaning broadened from purely physical touch to the inner sensations of the mind, so that by the medieval period 'feeling' could describe an emotion or a state of awareness as well as a bodily sense. The double 'e' in the spelling simply reflects the long vowel sound that the verb 'feel' has always carried. Because the word is so ordinary and follows the regular pattern of dropping nothing and adding -ing, it rarely causes spelling trouble for fluent writers.

How the word is built

• feel (Old English felan: to perceive by touch)
• -ing (noun/gerund suffix)