Looking

How to spell looking

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce looking

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does looking mean?

1. verbDirecting one's eyes towards something, or searching for or expecting something; the ongoing form of the verb 'look'.

Looking in a sentence

• She spent the afternoon looking for her missing keys.

• He was looking out of the train window at the passing fields.

Where does looking come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the present participle of the verb 'look', which descends from Old English 'locian', meaning 'to use one's eyes' or 'to gaze'. That verb belonged to the West Germanic family and has cousins in old Saxon and old German dialects, though it never spread widely across all the Germanic languages, which makes its deeper roots slightly obscure. From the earliest English texts 'look' carried both the literal sense of directing the eyes and the figurative sense of seeking or expecting something, and the '-ing' ending simply turns that verb into its ongoing or noun-like form. The doubled vowel 'oo' representing the short /ʊ/ sound is the only mild spelling quirk, since the same letters spell a longer sound in words like 'moon'. The word has stayed remarkably stable in form for over a thousand years.

How the word is built

• look (root: to direct one's eyes)
• -ing (present participle / gerund suffix)