Gazing

How to spell gazing

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce gazing

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does gazing mean?

1. verbLooking steadily and intently at something, often with wonder or absorption.

Gazing in a sentence

• She stood at the window, gazing at the city lights below.

• He spent the whole flight gazing out at the clouds.

Where does gazing come from?

Language of origin: Old Norse

The base word gaze first appears in Middle English in the late 1300s, where the verb gasen meant to stare or look intently. Its exact parentage is uncertain, but it is most often traced to a Scandinavian source; it is related to the Norwegian and Swedish dialect word gasa, meaning to gape or stare, and it sits in the same family as the verb gawk. The form gazing is simply the present participle, built by adding -ing to gaze, and English doubled nothing because the silent final -e is dropped before the suffix. That dropped -e is the small spelling trap here: writers must remember the word is gazing, not gazeing. The steady, lingering quality of the original sense has survived almost unchanged into modern use.

How the word is built

• gaze (to look steadily)
• -ing (present participle suffix)