Programming

How to spell programming

11 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce programming

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does programming mean?

1. nounThe activity of writing the coded instructions that tell a computer what to do.
2. nounThe planning and scheduling of content that a television or radio station broadcasts.

Programming in a sentence

• She learned programming at evening classes to change careers.

• The network changed its weekend programming to attract younger viewers.

• The job requires several years of software programming experience.

• Children's programming fills the early morning slots on that channel.

Where does programming come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word traces back to the Greek programma, meaning a 'public written notice', built from pro- ('before' or 'forth') and graphein ('to write'); the literal sense was something written up in advance for people to see. It passed through Late Latin as programma and entered English in the 1600s, at first meaning a written agenda or printed list of items, the sense still alive in a theatre programme. The verb 'to program', meaning to schedule or to arrange a sequence of instructions, grew out of that noun, and 'programming' is its gerund. When computers arrived in the mid twentieth century, the word was the natural choice for writing the coded instructions a machine follows step by step. The spelling trap is the doubled m: although the base 'program' has a single m, adding -ing doubles it to 'programming' in standard usage on both sides of the Atlantic, mirroring the way a stressed short vowel keeps its consonant doubled.

How the word is built

• pro- (before, forth)
• gram (something written, from Greek graphein 'to write')
• -ing (verbal noun/gerund suffix)