Outing

How to spell outing

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce outing

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does outing mean?

1. nounA short trip or excursion taken for pleasure, often with other people.
2. nounThe act of revealing private information about a person, especially against their wishes.

Outing in a sentence

• The whole office enjoyed a summer outing to the coast.

• The journalist defended the outing of the corrupt official.

• A family outing to the museum filled the rainy afternoon.

• The outing of the anonymous donor caused a small scandal.

Where does outing come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word is built from the plain native English word 'out', which descends from the Old English 'ut', meaning 'away' or 'outside', a word shared across the Germanic languages. The noun 'outing' formed when '-ing' was added to the verbal sense of 'out', that is, to go out, and it appeared in English around the early 1800s with the sense of a short pleasure trip away from home. The more recent meaning, the public revealing of a fact someone wished to keep private, grew in the late twentieth century from the idea of bringing something 'out' into the open. Because the spelling is simply 'out' plus '-ing', it keeps a single 't' rather than doubling, since the stress and the silent rules of consonant doubling do not call for it. The same humble 'out' root powers a huge family of everyday words, from 'output' to 'outside', all carrying the basic idea of being away from the inside.

How the word is built

• out (away from inside)
• -ing (noun suffix denoting an action or instance)