Occurring

How to spell occurring

9 letters · 3 syllables

The most common mistake is occuring. The letters people get wrong are highlighted.

occuring occurring

What people typed instead

• occuring6 people

How to pronounce occurring

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does occurring mean?

1. verbHappening or taking place, especially as an event or occurrence in progress.

Occurring in a sentence

• The power cuts occurring every winter are damaging local businesses.

• Engineers traced the fault to a glitch occurring only at high temperatures.

Where does occurring come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is the present participle of the verb 'occur', which English took from the Latin verb occurrere, meaning 'to run to meet' or 'to present itself'. That Latin verb was built from ob-, a prefix meaning 'toward' or 'against', joined to currere, the verb 'to run', so the literal image is of something running up to meet you. From 'running to meet' the sense softened into 'to come into being' or 'to happen', and later 'to come into the mind', which is why we still say an idea occurred to us. English adopted the word in the 1500s, and the same currere root powers a whole family of relatives such as 'current', 'occurrence', and 'recur'. The notorious spelling trap is the consonant doubling: because the stress falls on the final syllable of 'occur', the r doubles before -ing, giving the double c and double r that writers so often get wrong.

How the word is built

• oc- (from ob-: toward, against)
• cur (from Latin currere: to run)
• -r- (consonant doubled)
• -ing (present participle suffix)