Locating

How to spell locating

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce locating

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does locating mean?

1. verbFinding the exact position of something, or settling it in a particular place.

Locating in a sentence

• The engineer spent the morning locating the burst pipe under the floor.

• We had trouble locating the meeting room on the third floor.

Where does locating come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin noun locus, meaning simply 'a place', which gave rise to the verb locare, 'to place or set down'. From the past participle locatus came the English verb 'locate', recorded from the early 1600s, originally in the sense of fixing something in a particular spot or marking out a boundary. The present participle 'locating' adds the ordinary -ing ending to describe the ongoing act of finding or settling something in place. The same locus root sits inside familiar relatives such as 'location', 'local', and 'dislocate', and even 'lieutenant' shares a distant kinship through the idea of holding a place. The spelling keeps the silent -e of 'locate' dropped before -ing, a regular English rule that occasionally trips writers who want to keep the e.

How the word is built

• loc (from Latin locus: place)
• -ate (verb)
• -ing (present participle)