Nesting

How to spell nesting

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce nesting

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does nesting mean?

1. nounThe act of building or occupying a nest, or relating to that activity.
2. nounThe placing of one structure, loop, or element inside another in programming or data layout.
3. adjectiveDescribing objects, especially tables, designed to fit neatly one inside another.

Nesting in a sentence

• noun

  The nesting season brings many birds back to the garden.

• noun

  Deep nesting of loops can make the code harder to read.

• adjective

  She bought a set of nesting tables that tuck away under one another.

• noun

  Local volunteers track the nesting sites of the rare seabirds.

• noun

  The report flagged excessive nesting in the spreadsheet formulas.

• adjective

  The nesting bowls save a lot of cupboard space.

Where does nesting come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The base word 'nest' descends from the Old English 'nest', meaning the structure a bird builds to lay its eggs, and it traces back to a Proto-Germanic and ultimately Proto-Indo-European root that combined the elements meaning 'down' and 'sit', literally the place where a bird 'sits down'. Relatives survive across the Germanic and Latin worlds; the Latin 'nidus' (nest) shares the same ancient ancestry and gives us 'nidify'. The participle and gerund form 'nesting' simply adds the productive '-ing' ending, which English has used for centuries to turn verbs into nouns and adjectives. Over time the word stretched well beyond birds: by the twentieth century it described the snug fitting of objects inside one another, as with stackable tables or, in computing, structures placed within other structures. The spelling stays refreshingly regular, since 'nest' keeps its form and simply gains the familiar '-ing'.

How the word is built

• nest (a bird's home, from Old English)
• -ing (verb/gerund suffix)