Letting

How to spell letting

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce letting

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does letting mean?

1. verbThe act of allowing or permitting something to happen; present participle of 'let'.
2. nounA property available to rent, or the act of renting one out to a tenant.

Letting in a sentence

• verb

  Letting the dog out at night became part of his routine.

• noun

  The agency manages a holiday letting on the coast.

• verb

  She regretted letting her colleague take all the credit.

• noun

  Income from the letting covered most of the mortgage.

Where does letting come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the present participle and gerund of the verb 'let', which descends from the Old English 'lætan', meaning 'to allow, to leave behind, or to permit'. That verb belonged to a wider Germanic family, with close relatives such as Dutch 'laten' and German 'lassen', all carrying the sense of leaving something to happen or allowing it to be. Curiously, the same root once also produced a near opposite meaning, 'to hinder', which survives in the legal and tennis phrase 'without let or hindrance' and in the tennis 'let'. The spelling doubles the final 't' before '-ing' because 'let' is a single stressed syllable ending in a single vowel plus consonant, the standard English doubling rule. In British usage the gerund acquired a specialised property sense, 'the act of renting out a building', from the long-established use of 'to let' a house.

How the word is built

• let (to allow, leave)
• -t- (doubled consonant)
• -ing (present participle/gerund suffix)