Kidding

How to spell kidding

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce kidding

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does kidding mean?

1. verbTeasing someone or speaking in jest rather than seriously.

Kidding in a sentence

• He was only kidding when he said the office had closed for the week.

• She kept kidding her brother about his disastrous parallel parking.

Where does kidding come from?

Language of origin: Old Norse

This word sits on the small noun 'kid', which English borrowed from Old Norse 'kid' (spelled kið), meaning a young goat; Scandinavian settlers brought it into northern English around the 1200s. By the 1500s 'kid' had stretched playfully to mean a human child, and from that came the verb 'to kid', meaning to coax, hoax, or tease, first recorded in the 1700s, probably from the idea of treating someone like a gullible child. The teasing sense quickly became the dominant one, giving us the familiar 'only kidding'. The much older literal strand survives in farming, where 'kidding' still names the act of a nanny goat giving birth to a kid. The single doubled consonant in the spelling comes from the regular rule that a short stressed vowel before a final consonant doubles it before -ing, so 'kid' becomes 'kidding' rather than 'kiding'.

How the word is built

• kid (to joke, or a young goat)
• -ing (present participle/gerund suffix)