Parking

How to spell parking

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce parking

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does parking mean?

1. nounThe act of stopping and leaving a vehicle in a particular place, or the space provided for this.

Parking in a sentence

• The hotel offers free parking for overnight guests.

• Finding parking near the station can take twenty minutes.

Where does parking come from?

Language of origin: French

This word grows from the noun 'park', which entered English in the 1200s through Old French 'parc', meaning an enclosed tract of land set aside for game or pleasure. That French term traces back to a Medieval Latin word 'parricus', describing a fenced enclosure, and it has deep relatives among the Germanic languages, where similar words meant a paddock or pen. For centuries 'park' stayed firmly about land, but in the 1800s military usage began applying it to the orderly placing of artillery and wagons in a designated area, and from there 'to park' came to mean leaving a vehicle in a chosen spot. The gerund 'parking' for the act, or the space provided, took hold with the rise of the motor car in the early 1900s. The spelling is refreshingly regular: just 'park' plus '-ing', with the silent enclosure of land still hidden inside its history.

How the word is built

• park (enclosed ground; later, to place a vehicle)
• -ing (verbal noun/gerund suffix)