Flying

How to spell flying

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce flying

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does flying mean?

1. verbMoving through the air, or travelling or operating an aircraft.
2. nounThe activity or experience of travelling in or piloting an aircraft.
3. adjectiveDone very quickly or in passing, lasting only a short time.

Flying in a sentence

• verb

  She spent the whole afternoon flying her new drone over the field.

• noun

  Nervous passengers often find that flying becomes easier with practice.

• adjective

  She paid a flying visit to her parents between meetings.

• verb

  We are flying to Rome early on Saturday morning.

• noun

  He loves the freedom of flying and earned his pilot licence last year.

• adjective

  He made a flying start and finished the report before lunch.

Where does flying come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word grows from the Old English verb flēogan, which simply meant 'to move through the air on wings', a sense that has barely changed in well over a thousand years. The Old English ancestor belonged to a wider Germanic family, with close relatives in Dutch vliegen and German fliegen, all tracing back to a shared root describing rapid airborne movement. The present participle and verbal noun were formed by adding the productive ending '-ing', which Old English used to turn verbs into ongoing actions and into nouns naming an activity. Over the centuries the word broadened beyond birds and insects to cover kites, aircraft, and even figurative speed, giving us expressions like a 'flying visit' for something done very quickly. The spelling looks straightforward, but the trap is the dropped 'e': because 'fly' ends in a consonant plus 'y', the 'y' stays and we simply add '-ing', never 'flyeing'.

How the word is built

• fly (from Old English flēogan: to move through the air)
• -ing (forming present participle and noun)