Grouping

How to spell grouping

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce grouping

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does grouping mean?

1. nounA set of people or things gathered or classified together, or the act of arranging them into such sets.

Grouping in a sentence

• The report divides customers into a younger grouping and an older one.

• A clear grouping of the data made the trends easy to read.

Where does grouping come from?

Language of origin: French

The word grows from 'group', which English took from the French 'groupe' in the seventeenth century, originally a term used by painters for a cluster of figures arranged together in a picture. The French had borrowed it in turn from the Italian 'gruppo', meaning a knot, cluster, or bunch, and that Italian word probably traces back to a Germanic root related to a rounded mass or lump, the same family that gives us 'crop' and the idea of something bunched up. Once 'group' settled into English as both a noun and a verb, the gerund 'grouping' formed naturally by adding the ordinary '-ing' ending to the verb. It came to name both the act of arranging things into sets and the resulting set itself. The spelling is straightforward, but the unusual 'ou' from the French route is the one detail worth remembering, since the vowel sounds nothing like its spelling.

How the word is built

• group (a set or cluster)
• -ing (noun/gerund suffix)