Laughing

How to spell laughing

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce laughing

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does laughing mean?

1. verbExpressing amusement or joy with the characteristic sound and movement of laughter.
2. adjectiveShowing or characterised by laughter; cheerful and amused.

Laughing in a sentence

• verb

  The whole office was laughing at his story by lunchtime.

• adjective

  A laughing crowd filled the comedy club every Friday night.

• verb

  She kept laughing long after the joke had ended.

• adjective

  His laughing eyes made everyone feel at ease.

Where does laughing come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word comes from the Old English verb hlæhhan (also spelled hliehhan), meaning 'to laugh', which belonged to the broad Germanic family alongside the Old Norse hlæja, the Dutch lachen, and the German lachen. The root is widely thought to be imitative, an attempt to capture the actual sound of laughter, so the word effectively began life as an echo of the noise itself. The puzzling 'gh' in the modern spelling is a genuine fossil: it once stood for a rough, throaty consonant (like the 'ch' in the Scottish loch) that English speakers actually pronounced for centuries. That guttural sound faded out of the spoken language by the early modern period, but the scribal spelling stayed frozen on the page, leaving us with letters we no longer voice. The form 'laughing' is simply the verb plus the familiar '-ing' ending, and the silent 'gh' followed by an 'f'-like sound is exactly what trips up writers who spell by ear.

How the word is built

• laugh (from Old English hlæhhan, to laugh)
• -ing (present participle / adjective suffix)