Heating

How to spell heating

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce heating

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does heating mean?

1. nounThe system or process of keeping a building or space warm.
2. nounThe act of making something hot.

Heating in a sentence

• The heating broke down on the coldest night of the year.

• The heating of the metal weakened its structure over time.

• Central heating keeps every room in the house comfortable.

• Gentle heating of the sauce prevents it from curdling.

Where does heating come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word grows from the Old English verb hǣtan, meaning 'to make hot' or 'to become hot', which itself was formed from hāt, the Anglo-Saxon ancestor of the modern adjective 'hot'. The root belongs to a wider Germanic family, with close relatives such as Dutch heet and German heiss, all carrying the basic idea of warmth. The -ing ending is the familiar English suffix that turns a verb into a noun naming the activity or process, so 'heating' literally means the act of making something hot. Over the centuries the spelling settled with the long vowel shown by the 'ea' pair, even though that digraph is pronounced as a single 'ee' sound. By the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the word had taken on its now common meaning of the equipment and systems that warm a building, giving us phrases like 'central heating'.

How the word is built

• heat (Old English hǣtan: to make hot)
• -ing (noun/gerund suffix)