Flooring

How to spell flooring

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce flooring

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does flooring mean?

1. nounThe material used to make the surface of a floor, such as boards, tiles, or laminate.
2. verbPresent participle of floor: laying a floor surface, or knocking someone down or overwhelming them.

Flooring in a sentence

• noun

  They chose oak flooring for the entire ground level.

• verb

  The contractors spent the week flooring the upstairs bedrooms.

• noun

  Vinyl flooring is easy to wipe clean in a busy kitchen.

• verb

  His blunt answer was flooring the rest of the panel.

Where does flooring come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The base word 'floor' comes from the Old English flor, which meant the ground itself or a paved surface to stand on, and it has close cousins across the Germanic family, such as the Dutch vloer and German Flur, all pointing back to a root meaning a flat or level base. Over the centuries the sense narrowed from open ground to the worked surface inside a building. The form 'flooring' adds the productive English suffix -ing, which can turn a verb or noun into a word for the activity or, very commonly here, for the material that something is made of. By the seventeenth century 'flooring' was being used for the boards and other materials laid down to make a floor. The spelling keeps the double o of 'floor' intact, so the trap is simply remembering both o's rather than slimming it to a single one.

How the word is built

• floor (from Old English flor: ground, surface)
• -ing (noun/gerund suffix)