Knitting

How to spell knitting

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce knitting

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does knitting mean?

1. nounThe craft of making fabric or garments by looping yarn with needles, or the piece of work being made this way.
2. verbIn the act of looping yarn with needles to form fabric, or figuratively joining things closely together.

Knitting in a sentence

• noun

  Knitting is a calming hobby that many people take up to relax in the evening.

• verb

  She spent the whole train journey knitting a scarf for her nephew.

• noun

  Her half-finished knitting lay in a basket beside the armchair.

• verb

  The surgeon explained that the broken bone was already knitting back together.

Where does knitting come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word grows from the Old English verb cnyttan, which meant 'to tie in a knot' or 'to fasten together', and that verb is a close cousin of the noun 'knot'. Both come from a Germanic root preserved in related Scandinavian and Low German words for tying and binding, and that shared ancestry explains the silent initial 'k' that modern spellers must remember. For centuries the 'k' before 'n' was actually pronounced, so a speaker of Old or Middle English really did sound out the opening of words like 'knot', 'knee' and 'knit'; English speakers gradually stopped voicing it around the 1500s and 1600s, leaving the letter stranded in the spelling. The narrower sense of looping yarn with needles to make fabric developed later, and the form 'knitting' simply adds the verbal '-ing' ending to describe the ongoing activity or the work produced. The doubled 't' follows the regular English rule of doubling a final consonant after a short stressed vowel before '-ing'.

How the word is built

• knit (to tie or loop yarn, from Old English cnyttan)
• -t- (doubled consonant)
• -ing (verbal noun / present participle suffix)