Lightning

How to spell lightning

9 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce lightning

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does lightning mean?

1. nounThe brilliant flash of light produced by a natural electrical discharge during a storm.
2. adjectiveUsed before a noun to mean extremely fast or sudden, as in great speed.

Lightning in a sentence

• noun

  A bolt of lightning struck the old oak tree in the field.

• adjective

  The courier made a lightning delivery across the city in under an hour.

• noun

  The campers counted the seconds between the lightning and the thunder.

• adjective

  She solved the puzzle with lightning speed.

Where does lightning come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word grew out of the Old English noun leoht, meaning 'brightness' or 'light', the same root that gives us the everyday word 'light'. In Middle English a verb 'lightnen' developed, meaning 'to make bright' or 'to flash', and the noun form 'lightning' arose as a contracted spelling of the older 'lightening', which originally described any brightening or flashing. By the late 1300s the word had settled onto its modern sense: the brilliant electrical flash seen in a storm. The crucial point for spelling is that the storm word dropped the middle 'e' centuries ago, while the unrelated word 'lightening' (the act of making something lighter or brighter) kept it. So the trap is purely historical: same family, two spellings, and the flash in the sky is always the shorter one.

How the word is built

• light (bright, from Old English leoht)
• -n-
• -ing (noun-forming suffix); note the contracted form with no 'e', distinguishing it from 'lightening'