Protruding

How to spell protruding

10 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce protruding

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does protruding mean?

1. adjectiveSticking out or projecting beyond a surface or edge.

Protruding in a sentence

• She caught her sleeve on a protruding nail in the doorframe.

• The surgeon examined the protruding disc in his lower spine.

Where does protruding come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb protrudere, which combined pro, meaning 'forward', with trudere, meaning 'to thrust or push'. The literal sense was therefore 'to push forward', and that physical image of something being shoved outward survives intact in the modern meaning. English adopted protrude in the early seventeenth century, drawing directly on the Latin, and formed the participle protruding from it. The same trudere root pushes its way into several other English words, including intrude (to thrust oneself in), extrude (to push out), and abstruse (literally 'pushed away' and so hard to grasp). Remembering that buried trud, the thrusting root, helps fix the single d before the -ing and explains why the word is not spelled with a double letter.

How the word is built

• pro- (forward)
• trud (from Latin trudere: to thrust or push)
• -ing (present participle suffix)