Hawking

How to spell hawking

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce hawking

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does hawking mean?

1. verbOffering goods for sale, especially by carrying them about or promoting them aggressively.
2. verbHunting wild game using trained hawks or falcons.
3. verbClearing the throat noisily to bring up phlegm.

Hawking in a sentence

• Vendors were hawking souvenirs to tourists outside the station.

• Medieval nobles spent their autumn days hawking across open moorland.

• He kept hawking and spitting throughout the long bus ride.

• He made a living hawking cheap watches from a suitcase.

• The falconer taught the apprentice the old craft of hawking.

• The patient was hawking up mucus after the chest infection.

Where does hawking come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word draws on the verb 'hawk', which has two quite separate sources that happen to share a spelling. When it means hunting with trained birds of prey, it descends from the Old English 'hafoc', the native Germanic name for the bird, which gave us 'hawk' as both noun and verb. When it means selling goods in the street, it is a back-formation from 'hawker', a peddler, a word English picked up around the 1500s from Low German and Dutch traders (compare Middle Low German 'hoken', to peddle, and the related 'huckster'). A third everyday use, clearing the throat noisily, is imitative in origin, formed to echo the rough sound itself. All three meanings settled on the same -aw- spelling, where the 'w' belongs to the vowel digraph rather than standing as a separate consonant, which is the small trap that occasionally trips writers into 'hauking'.

How the word is built

• hawk (root)
• -ing (present participle / gerund suffix)