Laundering

How to spell laundering

10 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce laundering

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does laundering mean?

1. verbThe act of washing and ironing clothes and linen.
2. verbThe act of disguising the origins of illegally obtained money by passing it through legitimate transactions.

Laundering in a sentence

• The hotel charges extra for laundering guest clothing.

• The bank was fined for laundering drug profits through shell companies.

• She spent the afternoon laundering towels and bed sheets.

• Investigators traced the laundering of stolen funds across three countries.

Where does laundering come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb lavare, meaning simply 'to wash'. From a Vulgar Latin form lavandaria, 'things to be washed', came the Old French lavandier, a person who washed linen. English took this in as 'launder', originally a noun for a washerwoman, before it shifted into a verb meaning 'to wash and press cloth'. The unexpected 'd' in the spelling came from medieval pronunciation, where an extra consonant slipped between the 'n' and the 'r', the same kind of change that gave us 'thunder' from older forms. The figurative financial sense, disguising illegally obtained money by passing it through legitimate businesses, is a twentieth-century coinage that plays on the idea of making something 'dirty' come out 'clean'.

How the word is built

• laund- (from Latin lavare: to wash)
• -er (frequentative/agent element)
• -ing (verb/noun suffix)