Leveling

How to spell leveling

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce leveling

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does leveling mean?

1. verbMaking a surface flat, even, or horizontal, or making things equal.

Leveling in a sentence

• The contractor spent the morning leveling the concrete floor before the tiles arrived.

• The new tax policy aims at leveling the gap between high and low earners.

Where does leveling come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is the present participle and gerund of the verb 'level', which itself grew from the noun 'level'. The noun reached English in the 1300s through Old French 'livel' or 'liveau', a word for a builder's instrument used to check that a surface was flat. That French term descended from the Latin 'libella', a diminutive of 'libra', meaning 'a balance' or 'a pair of scales', the same 'libra' that names the zodiac sign and the pound weight. The literal idea was a small balance whose level indicated true horizontal, so 'to level' came to mean making something flat, even, or equal. The single-l American spelling 'leveling' follows the rule that an unstressed final syllable does not double its consonant before a suffix, which is exactly where British and Canadian writers double it to 'levelling'.

How the word is built

• level (from libella: a balance or level)
• -ing (verb inflection)

British and American spelling

Leveling is the American spelling. British English spells it levelling.