Giggling

How to spell giggling

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce giggling

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does giggling mean?

1. verbLaughing repeatedly in a light, silly, or nervous way.

Giggling in a sentence

• The children were giggling behind the curtain during the rehearsal.

• She kept giggling at the typo in the formal email.

Where does giggling come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word grows from the verb 'giggle', which is what linguists call imitative or echoic: the very sound of the word mimics the short, breathy, repeated laugh it describes. 'Giggle' appears in English from around the late sixteenth century, and it belongs to a family of related onomatopoeic words such as 'cackle', 'chuckle', and the Dutch 'gichelen', meaning to titter, which shows the same playful sound pattern. The doubled letter g and the soft -le ending capture the quick, bubbling quality of the laughter. Adding the -ing suffix turns the verb into its present participle and gerund, 'giggling', the ongoing act of laughing in a light, often nervous or silly way. Because the root simply imitates a sound rather than descending from a single ancient word, its spelling settled by convention, with the double g being the main thing a writer must remember.

How the word is built

• gigg- (giggle, an imitative root for a light laugh)
• -l- (frequentative)
• -ing (present participle/gerund)