Punishing

How to spell punishing

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce punishing

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does punishing mean?

1. adjectiveSo demanding, exhausting or severe that it feels like a penalty.
2. verbPresent participle of punish: imposing a penalty on someone for an offence.

Punishing in a sentence

• adjective

  The new manager set a punishing schedule of back-to-back meetings.

• verb

  The referee was punishing every minor foul with a yellow card.

• adjective

  The marathon route includes a punishing climb in the final mile.

• verb

  The court is punishing fraud more harshly than it did a decade ago.

Where does punishing come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word grows out of the verb 'punish', which English took from Old French 'puniss-', the extended stem of 'punir', meaning 'to penalise' or 'to chastise'. That French verb descended in turn from the Latin 'punire', 'to inflict a penalty on', which was built on the noun 'poena', meaning 'penalty' or 'pain'. The same 'poena' root still surfaces in English words such as 'penalty', 'penal' and 'pain', so the family connection helps explain the underlying sense. English adopted 'punish' in the 1300s and added the productive '-ing' ending to form both the participle (the act of punishing) and the adjective (something so demanding it feels like a penalty). The spelling trap is mild: there is a single 'n' and a single 's', and the soft 'sh' sound is written 'sh' rather than 'ti' or 'ci', so writers who hear 'punissing' must remember the plain '-ish' stem.

How the word is built

• pun- (from Latin poena: penalty)
• -ish (verb-forming suffix via French)
• -ing (present participle/adjective suffix)