Hovering

How to spell hovering

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce hovering

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does hovering mean?

1. verbRemaining suspended in the air over one spot, or staying close by without settling.

Hovering in a sentence

• The helicopter was hovering above the landing pad.

• A waiter kept hovering near our table all evening.

Where does hovering come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Hovering is the present participle of the verb 'hover', which appears in Middle English as 'hoveren'. That form looks like a frequentative built on an earlier verb 'hoven', meaning to linger, wait about, or stay suspended in one place, with the repeated '-er' suggesting a continuous, fidgety kind of action. The deeper roots of 'hoven' are genuinely obscure, and dictionaries do not connect it confidently to any single source; it may be native English, but the trail goes cold before Old English. The sense narrowed over time from a general 'to wait around' into the modern picture of something staying aloft in the air without moving forward. The spelling trap is mild but real: the single 'v' sits between two short vowels, and writers sometimes want to double it, but 'hover' takes only one 'v', so 'hovering' keeps a single 'v' too.

How the word is built

• hover (to float/linger)
• -ing (present participle)