Profiling

How to spell profiling

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce profiling

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does profiling mean?

1. nounThe act of compiling a detailed record of a person, group, or pattern of behaviour, often to predict or classify.
2. verbPresent participle of profile: compiling a detailed sketch or outline of a person or thing.

Profiling in a sentence

• noun

  The security firm used customer profiling to flag unusual transactions.

• verb

  The analysts spent the week profiling each suspect in detail.

• noun

  Critics argued that the police stops amounted to racial profiling.

• verb

  The developers are profiling the software to find slow sections of code.

Where does profiling come from?

Language of origin: Italian

The root of profiling is the noun profile, which English took in the seventeenth century from the Italian profilo, meaning an outline or a side view. That Italian word came from profilare, 'to draw in outline', built on the prefix pro-, meaning 'forth' or 'forward', and filare, 'to spin a thread or draw a line', which traces back to the Latin filum, meaning 'thread'. So a profile was originally the thread-like line you draw around the edge of a face or object seen from the side, which is why a portrait in profile shows the contour. Over time the noun became a verb, 'to profile', meaning to outline or to compile a detailed sketch of someone or something, and profiling is its gerund and present participle. The modern uses, such as criminal profiling, data profiling, and racial profiling, all keep that core idea of drawing up a detailed outline. The spelling trap is the single l: filum had one thread, and profiling keeps just one too.

How the word is built

• pro- (forth)
• fil (thread/line, from Latin filum)
• -ing (verbal noun/participle)