Mounting

How to spell mounting

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce mounting

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does mounting mean?

1. adjectiveSteadily increasing or growing, often used of pressure, costs, or concern.
2. nounA backing, frame, or support to which something is fixed for display or use.
3. verbPresent participle of mount: climbing, getting onto, or fixing something in place.

Mounting in a sentence

• adjective

  The family struggled to cope with the mounting debt.

• noun

  The photograph was set in a cream card mounting before framing.

• verb

  He was mounting the new shelf brackets to the wall when I arrived.

• adjective

  There was mounting pressure on the manager to resign.

• noun

  The engine sat on a rubber mounting to reduce vibration.

• verb

  The rider was mounting her horse at the far end of the field.

Where does mounting come from?

Language of origin: French

The base verb 'mount' came into English in the 1300s from the Old French 'monter', meaning 'to climb' or 'to go up', which grew out of the Latin 'montare', itself derived from 'mons' (stem 'montem'), the ordinary Latin word for a mountain or hill. The earliest English sense was the literal one of climbing up, as onto a horse or up a slope, and from there it widened to mean fixing something up in a raised or supported position, and later still to figures and totals that 'climb' or grow larger. The participle 'mounting' inherited all of these threads, which is why it now describes both a physical support that holds an object and a sense of pressure or numbers steadily rising. The same Latin 'mons' sits behind familiar relatives such as 'mountain', 'amount', and 'paramount'. The spelling is straightforward phonetically, with the only mild snag being the silent way the 'oun' is pronounced rather than the letters that spell it.

How the word is built

• mount (to climb, rise, or fix in place)
• -ing (present participle / noun suffix)