Polluting

How to spell polluting

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce polluting

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does polluting mean?

1. verbContaminating air, water, or soil with harmful or poisonous substances.
2. adjectiveDescribing something that releases harmful substances into the environment.

Polluting in a sentence

• verb

  The company was fined for polluting the river with chemical waste.

• adjective

  The city offered grants to replace older, heavily polluting vehicles.

• verb

  The new regulations target factories that keep polluting the air.

• adjective

  The report ranked the most polluting industries in the region.

Where does polluting come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word descends from the Latin verb polluere, which meant 'to soil, defile, or make unclean', and was formed from an intensifying prefix por- combined with luere, meaning 'to smear' or 'to wash over'. Its past participle pollutus gave English the verb 'pollute' in the late fourteenth century, when it carried a strongly moral or religious sense of profaning something sacred rather than fouling the physical environment. Over the centuries the meaning shifted from spiritual defilement toward the contamination of air, water, and soil, a usage that became dominant only in the industrial era. The present participle 'polluting' simply adds the everyday English -ing ending to that Latin root. A useful spelling reminder is the double 'l' carried straight over from polluere, while only a single 't' precedes the -ing.

How the word is built

• pollut- (from Latin polluere: to defile, contaminate)
• -ing (present participle / adjective suffix)