Logging

How to spell logging

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce logging

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does logging mean?

1. verbThe act of systematically recording events, measurements, or activity, especially in a file or register.
2. verbThe activity or business of cutting down trees and removing the timber.

Logging in a sentence

• The server keeps logging every failed login attempt for security.

• The company suspended logging in the protected valley after the protest.

• Careful logging of each delivery time helped the manager spot delays.

• Decades of unchecked logging stripped the hillside of its oldest trees.

Where does logging come from?

Language of origin: Other

This word is built on the noun 'log', whose origin is genuinely murky, which is why dictionaries usually call it 'of uncertain origin'. From at least the 1300s 'log' meant a bulky, shapeless piece of felled tree, and some scholars link it loosely to Old Norse 'lag', meaning something felled or laid down, though the connection is not secure. The forestry sense, the work of cutting and hauling timber, grew naturally from that physical 'log' of wood. A quite separate strand gave us the record-keeping sense: sailors used a wooden 'log' on a line to measure a ship's speed, and the daily record they wrote came to be called the 'logbook', so 'to log' meant to enter something in that book. From the deck of a ship the idea sailed into computing, where 'logging' now means writing events to a file. Notice the spelling trap: because 'log' ends in a single vowel plus a single consonant, the 'g' doubles before '-ing', giving the double-g 'logging'.

How the word is built

• log (timber; record)
• -g- (doubled consonant)
• -ing (verb/gerund suffix)