Fracking

How to spell fracking

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce fracking

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does fracking mean?

1. nounThe process of injecting high-pressure fluid into underground rock to release trapped oil or natural gas.

Fracking in a sentence

• The council voted to ban fracking near residential areas.

• Local farmers worried that fracking might contaminate the groundwater.

Where does fracking come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is a modern industry coinage, a clipped and respelled form of 'fracturing' as used in the full phrase 'hydraulic fracturing'. The root reaches back to the Latin verb frangere, meaning 'to break' or 'to shatter', which also gave English 'fracture', 'fragment', and 'fragile'. Oil and gas engineers had been writing the abbreviation 'frac' for the process since around the 1950s, but the gerund spelling with a 'k' arose to keep the hard 'c' sound clear; without it, 'fracing' would tempt readers toward a soft 'c'. The word moved sharply from technical jargon into everyday speech and headlines from the late 2000s onward, as the technique spread and became politically contentious. The added 'k' is the small spelling quirk worth remembering, since it exists purely to protect the pronunciation.

How the word is built

• frack (clipped from fracture, ultimately Latin frangere 'to break')
• -ing (verbal noun suffix)