Filing

How to spell filing

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce filing

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does filing mean?

1. nounThe activity of arranging and storing documents in an orderly system.
2. nounA document formally submitted to a court, tax authority, or regulator.

Filing in a sentence

• The new assistant spent the morning filing the contracts by client name.

• The company missed the deadline for its annual tax filing.

• Our office switched to a digital filing system to save shelf space.

• The court rejected the filing because two pages were missing.

Where does filing come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word traces back to the Latin filum, meaning a thread or wire, which in medieval offices became the metaphor for the thread or wire onto which loose papers were strung for safekeeping. From that practice English took the verb 'to file', meaning to arrange documents in order, and 'filing' is its gerund and present participle. A quite separate strand of the same family gave English the tool sense: a file is a ridged metal implement for smoothing, and 'filing' there means the act of abrading, with the resulting particles called filings. Both senses entered English from Old French in the late Middle Ages, and the spelling preserves the single 'l' inherited from file, which is exactly the trap, since writers reach for the doubled 'l' of the unrelated word 'filling'.

How the word is built

• file (from Latin filum, a thread or wire)
• -ing (verb/noun suffix)