Interacting

How to spell interacting

11 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce interacting

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does interacting mean?

1. verbActing upon or communicating with another person or thing in a reciprocal way.

Interacting in a sentence

• The staff spend most of the day interacting with customers at the counter.

• The two chemicals are interacting to produce a faint blue colour.

Where does interacting come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word descends from the Latin prefix inter-, meaning 'between' or 'among', joined to the verb 'act', which itself traces back to the Latin agere, meaning 'to do, drive, or set in motion'. The verb 'interact' was first assembled in English in the early nineteenth century to describe two or more things acting upon one another, and 'interacting' is simply its present participle. The same agere root sits inside a large family of everyday words including 'agent', 'agile', 'agenda', and 'action', all carrying the underlying sense of doing or driving. The spelling stays pleasingly regular: the prefix inter- keeps both its letters, and 'act' takes the ordinary -ing ending without any doubling, since the consonant is not preceded by a single stressed vowel. Knowing that it breaks cleanly into inter + act + ing is the surest way to spell it without hesitation.

How the word is built

• inter- (between, among)
• act (from Latin agere: to do, drive)
• -ing (present participle suffix)