Founding

How to spell founding

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce founding

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does founding mean?

1. nounThe act of establishing or setting up an institution, organisation, or settlement.
2. adjectiveRelating to the original establishment of something, as in a founding member or founding principle.

Founding in a sentence

• noun

  The founding of the company dates back to 1952.

• adjective

  She was a founding member of the local choir.

• noun

  Historians debate the exact year of the city's founding.

• adjective

  The founding partners signed the agreement in a back office.

Where does founding come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word is the -ing form of the verb 'found', meaning to establish or set up, which English took from Old French fonder in the 1200s and ultimately from the Latin fundare, 'to lay a base or foundation', built on fundus, meaning 'bottom' or 'ground'. The same fundus root underlies 'fundamental', 'foundation', and even 'profound' (literally 'toward the bottom'), so the idea of laying something at the base runs through the whole family. A separate but related sense, 'founding' in the context of melting and casting metal, comes from a different Latin verb, fundere, meaning 'to pour or melt', which also gave us 'foundry'. Because two distinct Latin verbs (fundare 'to base' and fundere 'to pour') fed into the same English shape, the word carries both the establishing sense and the metalworking sense today. The single -d and the keeping of the silent reading of the vowel make 'founding' easy to confuse in writing with 'foundering', the unrelated word for sinking or failing.

How the word is built

• found (from Latin fundare: to lay a base)
• -ing (verbal noun / present-participle suffix)