Kneeling

How to spell kneeling

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce kneeling

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does kneeling mean?

1. verbResting on one or both knees, with the lower legs bent back beneath the body.

Kneeling in a sentence

• The gardener spent the afternoon kneeling beside the flower beds.

• Kneeling on the hard floor for an hour left her legs aching.

Where does kneeling come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word descends from the Old English verb cneowlian, meaning 'to bend the knee', which was built directly on the noun cneow, the Anglo-Saxon word for the knee. That noun goes back to a shared Germanic root that also gave German Knie and Dutch knie, and even further back to a very old Indo-European root for the joint of the leg. The silent k at the front is the real spelling trap: it was once fully pronounced, so speakers of Old and Middle English actually said the k sound before words like knee, knife, and knot. English gradually stopped voicing that initial k during the 1500s and 1600s, but the letter stayed frozen in the spelling, which is why kneeling begins with a k that the ear never hears. The doubled e simply carries over from knee, the body part on which the action depends.

How the word is built

• knee (from Old English cneow: knee)
• -l (verb-forming element in 'kneel')
• -ing (present participle suffix)