Grooming

How to spell grooming

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce grooming

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does grooming mean?

1. nounThe activity of cleaning, brushing, and tending to the body or coat, whether one's own or an animal's.
2. nounThe act of training or preparing a person, over time, to take on a particular role or position.

Grooming in a sentence

• The salon offers a full grooming service for long-haired dogs.

• The firm spent two years grooming her for the chief executive role.

• Good personal grooming is expected of staff who meet clients face to face.

• His grooming as the next club captain began long before the announcement.

Where does grooming come from?

Language of origin: Unknown

This word grows from the noun 'groom', which surfaces in Middle English as 'grom' or 'grome', meaning a boy, a young man, or a male servant; its ultimate origin is genuinely uncertain, with no clear ancestor recorded in Old English or the neighbouring Germanic languages. By the 1500s a groom was specifically a servant who attended to horses, and from that duty the verb 'to groom', meaning to feed, brush, and care for horses, developed by the early 1800s. The sense soon widened from animals to people, so that grooming came to mean tending one's own cleanliness and appearance, and by the late 1800s it carried the figurative meaning of preparing or training someone for a role. The darker modern sense, describing a predator building trust with a victim in order to abuse them, is a late twentieth century extension of that same idea of careful preparation. The spelling keeps the double 'o' of 'groom' but only a single 'm' before the ending, which is the small point writers most often slip on.

How the word is built

• groom (to tend, clean, or make tidy)
• -ing (forming a verbal noun)