Learning

How to spell learning

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce learning

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does learning mean?

1. nounThe acquisition of knowledge or skills, or the body of knowledge so acquired.
2. verbThe present participle of learn: in the process of gaining knowledge or a skill.

Learning in a sentence

• noun

  The company invests heavily in staff training and learning.

• verb

  He is currently learning Spanish for an upcoming move to Madrid.

• noun

  Early childhood learning shapes a person's later confidence.

• verb

  The new recruits are still learning how the filing system works.

Where does learning come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word grows from the Old English verb leornian, which meant 'to acquire knowledge' or 'to study', and which is closely related to the verb 'lore', the body of traditional knowledge. The Germanic root behind it carried the underlying sense of following a track or gaining a footing, the idea of finding one's way along a path of knowing. Over the centuries leornian smoothed into modern 'learn', and adding the productive suffix -ing produced both the verbal noun 'learning' (the activity or the accumulated knowledge itself) and the present participle (the ongoing action). By the medieval period 'learning' had also taken on the prestigious sense of scholarship and erudition, so a person of 'great learning' was a scholar. The spelling stays helpfully regular: the single base word 'learn' simply takes -ing, with no doubled consonant and no dropped letter to trip the writer.

How the word is built

• learn (Old English leornian: to acquire knowledge)
• -ing (forming a noun or present participle)