Polishing

How to spell polishing

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce polishing

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does polishing mean?

1. verbRubbing a surface to make it smooth, clean, and glossy.
2. verbImproving or refining something, such as writing, a skill, or a performance.

Polishing in a sentence

• He spent the whole evening polishing the silver cutlery.

• The editor is polishing the final draft of the report.

• Polishing the car bonnet brought back its showroom shine.

• The band kept polishing their set list before the tour.

Where does polishing come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb polire, which literally meant 'to make smooth or sleek', the action a craftsman performed when rubbing a surface until it shone. Latin carried it into Old French as polir, whose stem appeared as poliss- in many of its forms, and that stem is exactly where the English -ish ending comes from, much as it does in 'finish' from finir and 'punish' from punir. English adopted the verb in the early 1300s, first for the literal smoothing of stone, metal, and wood, and soon afterwards for the figurative sense of refining manners, prose, or performance. The shiny single-l, single-s spelling can mislead writers who expect a doubled consonant, but the root has only one l and one s throughout. It is worth noting the unrelated capitalised word 'Polish', meaning 'of Poland', which looks identical yet comes from a completely different source.

How the word is built

• polish (root, from Latin polire: to make smooth)
• -ing (present participle / gerund suffix)