Flirting

How to spell flirting

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce flirting

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does flirting mean?

1. verbBehaving in a playful or teasing way that signals romantic or sexual interest.
2. verbToying with an idea or risk without full commitment.

Flirting in a sentence

• She accused her colleague of flirting with every new intern.

• The company has been flirting with the idea of moving its offices abroad.

• He spent the whole party flirting instead of mingling with the hosts.

• By skipping the safety checks he was flirting with disaster.

Where does flirting come from?

Language of origin: Other

The base verb 'flirt' surfaced in English in the sixteenth century, and its earliest recorded senses were oddly physical: to flick or sneer at someone, and to make a quick jerking movement, as in flirting a fan open or a bird flirting its tail. The word is widely thought to be imitative in origin, its sound echoing the brisk flicking action it described, though some have linked it to the Old French 'fleureter', meaning to talk sweet nonsense or to flit lightly from flower to flower (from 'fleur', flower). By the early eighteenth century the playful sense had won out, and 'flirt' settled into its modern meaning of behaving in a teasing, romantically suggestive way. The '-ing' form simply adds the participle and gerund ending to that verb, so the spelling trap is purely the single 't' before '-ing'. Because the root ends in a vowel plus a single consonant after another consonant ('r'), the 't' is not doubled, which trips up writers who expect a 'flirtting' pattern.

How the word is built

• flirt (to behave amorously)
• -ing (present participle / gerund suffix)