Hoping

How to spell hoping

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce hoping

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does hoping mean?

1. verbWishing for a particular outcome and expecting or trusting that it may happen.

Hoping in a sentence

• She signed the lease hoping the rent would not rise again.

• The whole team was hoping for a calmer week after the deadline.

Where does hoping come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the present participle of the verb hope, which descends from the Old English hopian, meaning to wish for something with expectation or to trust that it will happen. The noun form, hopa, sat alongside it, and both are part of the native Germanic word stock rather than borrowings from Latin or French. Curiously, the deeper origins of the word are uncertain; unlike many emotional verbs it has no clear cousins across the older Germanic languages, which has led scholars to flag its earliest history as obscure. The spelling trap here is purely modern and mechanical: because hope ends in a silent e following a single consonant, that e is dropped before -ing, and the consonant is not doubled, giving hoping rather than hopping. The doubled-p form belongs to a completely different verb, hop, where the short vowel does force a doubled consonant.

How the word is built

• hop- (root, from hope: to wish or expect)
• -ing (present participle suffix, with the silent e of hope dropped)