Grinding

How to spell grinding

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce grinding

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does grinding mean?

1. verbCrushing or reducing something into smaller pieces or powder by pressure or friction.
2. adjectiveHarsh, exhausting, and seemingly without end.

Grinding in a sentence

• verb

  The mill kept grinding the wheat into fine flour.

• adjective

  Years of grinding poverty wore the family down.

• verb

  She was grinding the coffee beans before breakfast.

• adjective

  The commute became a grinding daily ordeal.

Where does grinding come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The base verb comes straight from the Old English grindan, which meant to reduce something to powder or fragments by crushing it between two hard surfaces, exactly what a mill does to grain. It belongs to a family of related Germanic words, and its deeper ancestry points to an old root meaning to rub together or scrape, the same notion that gives us the idea of teeth gnashing. The participle and gerund form grinding has been in use for many centuries, and from the literal sense of slow, laborious crushing it developed a vivid figurative meaning of something harsh, wearing, and relentless, as in grinding poverty or a grinding routine. The spelling is reassuringly regular: the -ing simply attaches to grind with no doubling and no dropped letter, because the verb ends in a consonant after a long vowel sound. That same grindan also underlies the modern noun grindstone, the stone wheel once turned by hand to sharpen blades.

How the word is built

• grind (from Old English grindan: to crush, gnash)
• -ing (forming present participle, gerund, and adjective)