Filling

How to spell filling

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce filling

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does filling mean?

1. nounA quantity of material used to fill a space or cavity, especially the material a dentist sets into a tooth.
2. nounAn edible mixture placed inside a pie, sandwich, cake, or similar dish.
3. adjectiveOf food: satisfying and leaving a person feeling full.

Filling in a sentence

• noun

  The dentist said the old filling in her molar needed replacing.

• noun

  The bakery offers a rich chocolate filling in its layer cakes.

• adjective

  The stew was cheap, hot, and surprisingly filling on a cold day.

• noun

  The builders used a foam filling to seal the gap around the pipe.

• noun

  She spread a thick egg filling between the slices of bread.

• adjective

  A bowl of porridge makes a filling breakfast before a long shift.

Where does filling come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The word grows straight from the native Old English verb fyllan, meaning 'to make full', which itself was built on the adjective full. That Germanic root runs through many related languages, including the Old Norse fylla and the Old High German fullen, all carrying the same plain idea of filling a space to capacity. Adding the productive English suffix -ing turned the verb into a noun for either the act of filling or the substance that does the filling, a pattern English uses constantly (covering, lining, stuffing). The food sense, the material packed inside a pie or sandwich, and the dental sense, the material set into a hole in a tooth, both arose from this concrete 'stuff put in to fill' meaning. Because the base verb already ends in a doubled L, the spelling trap for writers is remembering that filling keeps both L's and simply adds -ing, giving the double L plus single G ending.

How the word is built

• fill (root, from Old English fyllan: to make full)
• -ing (noun/adjective suffix)