Hatching

How to spell hatching

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce hatching

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does hatching mean?

1. verbThe act of young birds, fish, or reptiles breaking out of their eggs.
2. nounShading made with closely spaced parallel lines in drawing or engraving.

Hatching in a sentence

• verb

  The chicks are hatching in the warm incubator this morning.

• noun

  The artist used fine hatching to suggest shadow on the face.

• verb

  The keeper watched the turtle eggs slowly hatching on the beach.

• noun

  Close hatching across the metal plate gave the engraving its depth.

Where does hatching come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The everyday sense comes from the Middle English verb hacchen, 'to produce young from an egg', which is Germanic in origin and related to words in Old Norse and German for breeding or bringing forth young. By the late 1300s it described both the bird breaking free of its shell and, by extension, any scheme or plot being secretly brought to life. The drawing sense travelled a separate road: it comes from the French hacher, 'to chop or cut', the same root that gives us 'hatchet', because an engraver seemed to slice the surface with fine parallel strokes. These two unrelated 'hatch' words eventually settled on the same English spelling, which is why a single form covers both eggs and shading. The spelling keeps the -tch- cluster typical of native English words after a short vowel, just like 'catch' and 'match'.

How the word is built

• hatch (to break out of an egg; from Middle English hacchen)
• -ing (forming a gerund/participle)