Grazing

How to spell grazing

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce grazing

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does grazing mean?

1. verbFeeding on grass or other growing plants, as livestock do in a field.
2. verbEating small amounts of food frequently throughout the day rather than at set meals.
3. verbTouching or scraping a surface lightly in passing.

Grazing in a sentence

• The cattle were grazing quietly in the lower paddock all afternoon.

• She avoided big dinners and kept grazing on fruit and nuts instead.

• The ball went past, just grazing the top of the crossbar.

• The farm rents out summer grazing on the upland slopes.

• Office workers spent the meeting grazing on a platter of pastries.

• The car scraped along the wall, grazing the paintwork as it went.

Where does grazing come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word grows directly from the Old English verb grasian, meaning 'to feed on growing grass', which was formed from the noun graes, the ancestor of modern 'grass'. The link is no accident: the everyday sense of cattle cropping a field is literally 'doing grass'. Over the centuries the verb picked up a second, looser meaning, 'to touch or scrape lightly in passing', recorded from around the 1600s, perhaps from the image of an animal's mouth or a passing object barely skimming a surface. The form 'grazing' is the present participle and verbal noun, used both as an action ('the sheep are grazing') and as a thing ('good grazing on the hillside'). Because it descends from the same Germanic root as 'grass', the single z is the only real spelling decision, since the long a sound and the soft z are predictable to most adults.

How the word is built

• graze (from Old English grasian, to feed on grass)
• -ing (verb/noun suffix)