Piling

How to spell piling

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce piling

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does piling mean?

1. nounA long post or column driven deep into the ground to support a building, bridge, or pier.
2. verbStacking or accumulating things into a heap; the present participle of pile.

Piling in a sentence

• noun

  The engineers checked that each steel piling reached solid bedrock.

• verb

  She kept piling paperwork onto the corner of her desk all afternoon.

• noun

  The old jetty rested on a timber piling that had rotted at the waterline.

• verb

  The unpaid bills were piling up faster than he could manage them.

Where does piling come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word sits on top of two strands of "pile" that fed into English from Latin. The construction sense, a heavy post driven into the ground, traces back to the Old English pil, meaning a pointed stake or shaft, which was itself borrowed from the Latin pilum, the name of the heavy javelin carried by Roman soldiers; the idea of a sharpened shaft driven forcefully into something carried over neatly into building work. The everyday "heap" sense came in later from the Old French pile, a stack or mass, which descended from the Latin pila, meaning a stone pier or pillar, the kind of solid mound builders would raise. By the medieval period English had merged these threads into the single verb "to pile" and its present participle "piling". The spelling keeps a single l because it is simply pile with the silent e dropped before -ing, which is the trap: writers who double the consonant produce the unrelated "pilling".

How the word is built

• pile (post or heap)
• -ing (verbal/noun suffix)