Landing

How to spell landing

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce landing

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does landing mean?

1. nounThe act of coming down to and settling on the ground or a surface, especially by an aircraft.
2. nounA level platform at the top of a flight of stairs or between two flights.

Landing in a sentence

• The pilot announced a smooth landing despite the strong crosswind.

• She left the laundry basket on the upstairs landing overnight.

• Heavy fog forced the crew to delay their landing for an hour.

• The narrow landing between the two floors barely fit a bookshelf.

Where does landing come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The word grows from the Old English noun land, which meant 'ground, earth, or a defined territory' and is shared across the Germanic family with near-identical relatives in Dutch, German, and the Scandinavian tongues. To this ancient base English added the suffix -ing, which turns a verb or noun into the name of an action or the result of it; so 'landing' first named the act of bringing something onto land, especially goods or people off a ship. From the 1400s the sense widened to the place where a boat docks, then in the 1500s to the flat resting platform on a staircase, and in the twentieth century it stretched naturally to aircraft touching down. The spelling is mercifully transparent: it is simply land plus -ing, with no doubled consonant, because the d already closes the short stressed syllable. Remembering that it is the single word 'land' with a plain ending keeps writers from inventing extra letters.

How the word is built

• land (ground, from Old English land)
• -ing (noun-forming suffix denoting an action or thing)