Landscaping

How to spell landscaping

11 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce landscaping

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does landscaping mean?

1. nounThe activity of arranging and improving the appearance of a garden or area of ground with plants, paths, and other features.

Landscaping in a sentence

• The new landscaping around the office included low hedges and a gravel path.

• Professional landscaping added thousands to the value of the property.

Where does landscaping come from?

Language of origin: Dutch

This word grows out of 'landscape', which English borrowed in the late 1500s from the Dutch 'landschap', a term that literally meant a 'region' or 'tract of land' and was built from 'land' plus the suffix '-schap' (the Dutch cousin of the English '-ship', meaning 'condition or quality'). Dutch and Flemish painters were the masters of scenic painting at the time, so the word first entered English as an artists' term for a picture showing inland scenery, only later coming to mean the actual stretch of countryside itself. From there English added the familiar '-ing' ending to form 'landscaping', describing the deliberate work of shaping and arranging the land of a garden or grounds for beauty and use. The buried '-scape' is worth remembering when spelling it, since it is the same element that surfaces in 'seascape' and 'cityscape'. The original Dutch sense reminds us that the word was always about how a piece of land is composed, whether on canvas or in a real garden.

How the word is built

• land (ground, territory)
• -scape (from Dutch -schap: shape, condition)
• -ing (noun/verb suffix)