Leaking

How to spell leaking

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce leaking

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does leaking mean?

1. verbAllowing liquid or gas to pass accidentally through a hole or crack.
2. verbDeliberately disclosing confidential information to the public or press.

Leaking in a sentence

• The radiator was leaking coolant all over the garage floor.

• The company suspected an employee of leaking internal figures to a rival.

• A leaking tap kept us awake for most of the night.

• Someone in the department was leaking details of the merger before the announcement.

Where does leaking come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The base word leak comes from Middle English leken, meaning to let water in or out, and it traces back to a Germanic root shared with the Old Norse leka and the Middle Dutch leken, both of which described liquid trickling or dripping through a gap. The underlying sense was always physical: a vessel, roof, or hull that failed to hold its contents. By the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the verb was firmly established in English for ships taking on water and barrels losing their drink. The figurative use, where secret information escapes to the public, grew naturally from this image of fluid slipping out through a crack and became common in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The present participle simply adds -ing to leak; because the root ends in a single vowel plus a single consonant after a long vowel sound, the k is not doubled, which keeps the spelling reassuringly regular.

How the word is built

• leak (root: to let liquid or gas pass through)
• -ing (present participle suffix)