Killing

How to spell killing

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce killing

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does killing mean?

1. nounThe act of causing the death of a person or animal.
2. nounA sudden and very large financial gain, used in the informal phrase 'make a killing'.
3. adjectiveInformally, extremely tiring, or so funny that it overwhelms you.

Killing in a sentence

• noun

  The documentary examined the illegal killing of elephants for ivory.

• noun

  She made a killing when she sold the shares before the market dipped.

• adjective

  The final sprint up the hill set a killing pace for the runners.

• noun

  Detectives spent months investigating the killing of the shopkeeper.

• noun

  The traders made a quick killing on the rising oil price.

• adjective

  His deadpan jokes at dinner were absolutely killing.

Where does killing come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The base verb 'kill' first appears in Middle English as 'cullen' or 'killen', meaning to strike, beat, or put to death, and it became firmly established by the 1200s. Its earlier history is genuinely uncertain: it may descend from an unrecorded Old English form related to 'cwellan' (to kill or quell), which also gave us 'quell', or it may share roots with words for striking and knocking. The familiar '-ing' suffix is the native Old English ending that turns a verb into a noun naming the action or into a present participle. Over the centuries the figurative senses grew up around it, so that by the 1800s 'making a killing' described a sudden large profit and 'killing' could mean exhausting or wildly funny. The spelling keeps the doubled 'l' from the short vowel in 'kill', which is the only real point to watch when adding the ending.

How the word is built

• kill (verb root)
• -ing (forms a gerund, participle, or noun)