Foraging

How to spell foraging

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce foraging

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does foraging mean?

1. verbSearching widely for food or provisions, especially wild food gathered from the countryside.

Foraging in a sentence

• The squirrels spent the morning foraging for acorns under the oak trees.

• She took a weekend course on foraging for edible mushrooms and berries.

Where does foraging come from?

Language of origin: French

The word traces back through Old French to fourrage, meaning 'fodder' or 'food for animals', which was built on the older fuerre, a word for straw or animal feed that the French had themselves taken from a Germanic source. English borrowed the noun and verb forage in the 1300s, originally in a military sense: soldiers on campaign were sent out to forage, that is, to scour the countryside for provisions and feed for their horses. From this came the wider modern meaning of wandering about in search of food or supplies, whether by animals hunting for berries or by people gathering wild plants. The present participle foraging simply adds the familiar -ing ending; note that the spelling keeps a single r and drops the silent e of forage before -ing, so it is foraging, not 'forrageing'.

How the word is built

• forag- (from forage: to search for food)
• -ing (present participle/gerund suffix)