Hoarding

How to spell hoarding

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce hoarding

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does hoarding mean?

1. nounThe act of accumulating and storing up large quantities of something, often more than is needed.
2. nounA large board used for displaying advertisements, or a temporary fence around a building site.

Hoarding in a sentence

• The pandemic led to widespread hoarding of tinned food and toilet paper.

• A giant hoarding beside the motorway advertised the new car model.

• Compulsive hoarding filled every room of the house with newspapers and boxes.

• The builders erected a timber hoarding around the construction site to keep the public out.

Where does hoarding come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The core word here is hoard, which descends directly from the Old English hord, meaning a treasure or a secret store of valuables; it has close cousins across the Germanic languages, such as the Old High German hort, all pointing back to the idea of something guarded and hidden away. From that noun English formed the verb to hoard, and hoarding is simply its present participle and verbal noun, describing the act of amassing and keeping things in quantity. A quite separate British sense, a tall temporary fence or a large advertising board, comes by a different route: it grew out of an older word hoard or hourd for a wooden platform or palisade, borrowed from Old French hourd (a scaffold or barrier) in the medieval period. The two senses have drifted together in spelling but never in meaning. The spelling trap is the silent-feeling oa: the word is built on hoard, not the misspelling 'hord', so keeping the a in mind preserves the link to the original Old English hord.

How the word is built

• hoard (store, treasure)
• -ing (verbal noun / present participle suffix)