Frosting

How to spell frosting

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce frosting

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does frosting mean?

1. nounA sweet sugary coating spread or piped over cakes and pastries.
2. nounA thin layer of frost or a frosted, semi-opaque finish on a surface.

Frosting in a sentence

• She spread a thick layer of chocolate frosting across the sponge cake.

• A delicate frosting of ice covered the car windscreen overnight.

• The recipe calls for butter and icing sugar to make the frosting.

• The glass door has a decorative frosting that blurs the view.

Where does frosting come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word grows directly out of the native English noun 'frost', which traces back to Old English 'forst' or 'frost', meaning the thin coating of ice crystals that forms on cold surfaces. That noun comes from the same ancient Germanic root that gives German 'Frost' and Dutch 'vorst', all tied to the idea of freezing. The verb sense 'to frost', meaning to cover with a frost-like layer, developed naturally, and adding the noun-forming suffix '-ing' produced 'frosting' for the result of that covering. By the nineteenth century, especially in American kitchens, bakers borrowed the image of a pale, powdery winter coating and applied it to the sweet sugar layer spread over cakes, so the dessert sense and the icy sense share one frozen ancestor. The spelling is mercifully regular: just keep the single 's' and the '-ing' that any English speaker already knows.

How the word is built

• frost (frozen dew, from Old English forst)
• -ing (noun suffix forming the result of an action)