Lighting

How to spell lighting

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce lighting

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does lighting mean?

1. nounThe arrangement, equipment, or effect of light used to illuminate a space.

Lighting in a sentence

• The new office has soft lighting that reduces eye strain.

• The photographer adjusted the lighting before the portrait session.

Where does lighting come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word grows out of the Old English noun and adjective leoht, meaning 'brightness' or 'not dark', which traces back to a Germanic root shared with German Licht and Dutch licht and ultimately to an ancient root meaning 'to shine'. The verb 'to light', in the sense of setting something alight or providing illumination, developed from the same family, and adding the suffix -ing turned that verb into a noun describing the act or arrangement of providing light. Over the centuries 'lighting' came to mean both the equipment used to illuminate a space and the overall visual effect that equipment creates, a sense that became especially common with the spread of theatres, photography, and electric power. The crucial spelling trap is its near-twin 'lightning', the electrical flash, which inserts an extra 'n'; 'lighting' keeps the simple verb 'light' fully visible before -ing, whereas 'lightning' does not. Remembering that 'lighting' is just 'light' plus '-ing' is the surest way to avoid writing the storm word by mistake.

How the word is built

• light (from Old English leoht: brightness, illumination)
• -ing (noun-forming suffix)