Harvesting

How to spell harvesting

10 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce harvesting

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does harvesting mean?

1. verbGathering in a ripened crop, or collecting a natural or produced resource.
2. nounThe process or activity of collecting a crop or resource.

Harvesting in a sentence

• verb

  The farmers are harvesting wheat in the north field this week.

• noun

  The company's water harvesting system stores rainfall for the dry months.

• verb

  Harvesting the apples early protected them from the autumn storms.

• noun

  Sustainable timber harvesting leaves enough trees for the forest to recover.

Where does harvesting come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word grows from the Old English noun 'hærfest', which originally meant 'autumn', the season when crops were gathered, rather than the act of gathering itself. It belongs to a wider Germanic family that includes the Dutch 'herfst' and the German 'Herbst', both still meaning 'autumn' today, and it traces back to an ancient root meaning 'to pluck' or 'to gather'. Over the medieval period the sense in English shifted from the season to the work done in that season, so 'harvest' came to mean the reaping and collecting of the crop. The verb sense, and with it the form 'harvesting', developed later as people spoke of the activity directly. A useful spelling note is that the silent middle is straightforward: it is simply 'harvest' with '-ing' added, with no doubling of the final 't'.

How the word is built

• harvest (root: the gathering of ripened crops)
• -ing (present participle / gerund suffix)