Hammering

How to spell hammering

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce hammering

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does hammering mean?

1. verbStriking something repeatedly and forcefully, with a hammer or in a similar pounding way.
2. nounA heavy beating or severe defeat, used informally.

Hammering in a sentence

• verb

  The builder spent the morning hammering nails into the new fence.

• noun

  The home team took a real hammering in the second half.

• verb

  She could hear rain hammering against the bedroom window all night.

• noun

  His savings took a hammering when the market suddenly dropped.

Where does hammering come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The base word hammer descends from the Old English hamor, the name of the striking tool, and it has close cousins across the Germanic languages, including the German Hammer and the Old Norse hamarr. Intriguingly, hamarr in Old Norse also meant a crag or rocky outcrop, and many scholars think the very earliest sense was a stone, since the first hammers were simply shaped rocks. As metalworking spread, the word settled firmly on the tool and then on the action of using it. The verb form was in use by the 1500s, and adding the -ing suffix produced both the present participle and a verbal noun describing the act of repeated striking. The doubled m comes from the short vowel in the original hamor, and remembering that single-vowel root helps fix the spelling.

How the word is built

• hammer (from Old English hamor: a tool for striking)
• -ing (present participle / verbal noun suffix)