Raging

How to spell raging

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce raging

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does raging mean?

1. adjectiveExtremely violent, intense, or out of control.
2. verbPresent participle of rage: continuing with great force or anger.

Raging in a sentence

• adjective

  The firefighters battled a raging blaze for several hours.

• verb

  The debate was still raging when the meeting finally ended at midnight.

• adjective

  A raging fever kept her in bed for the whole weekend.

• verb

  The wildfire kept raging across the dry hillside for days.

Where does raging come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word grows out of the noun and verb 'rage', which English borrowed from Old French 'rage' in the 1300s. The French word descended from the Latin 'rabies', meaning 'madness' or 'fury', which itself came from the verb 'rabere', 'to rave' or 'to be mad'. The same Latin ancestor gives us the disease name 'rabies', and the link is no accident: both describe a state of furious loss of control. The participle 'raging' simply adds the '-ing' ending to 'rage', and here lies the common spelling trap, because the silent 'e' of 'rage' is dropped before the suffix, giving 'raging' rather than 'rageing'. By the 1500s 'raging' was widely used both for human fury and for violent natural forces such as storms and fires.

How the word is built

• rage (from Latin rabies: madness, fury)
• -ing (present participle / adjective suffix)