Mating

How to spell mating

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce mating

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does mating mean?

1. nounThe pairing of animals or birds in order to breed.
2. verbPresent participle of 'mate': pairing to breed, or joining two parts so they fit together.

Mating in a sentence

• noun

  The documentary explained the elaborate mating rituals of certain birds.

• verb

  The engineer checked that the two mating surfaces sat flush against each other.

• noun

  The zoo carefully managed the mating of its rare pandas.

• verb

  The salmon were mating in the shallow gravel beds upstream.

Where does mating come from?

Language of origin: Dutch

The base word 'mate' arrived in English in the late Middle Ages from Middle Low German and Middle Dutch 'mate' or 'gemate', meaning a companion or someone you share with. That word is closely tied to the old Germanic root that also gives us 'meat', because a mate was originally a person you shared your food and table with, a messmate. From the sense of companion it broadened to mean a partner of either sex, and by the sixteenth century it took on the biological sense of a breeding partner. The present participle 'mating' simply adds the ordinary '-ing' ending, and because 'mate' ends in a silent 'e' that drops before the suffix, the result is the single 't' spelling that distinguishes it from 'matting', the word for woven floor covering.

How the word is built

• mate (companion; to pair)
• -ing (present participle / gerund suffix)