Railing

How to spell railing

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce railing

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does railing mean?

1. nounA fence or barrier made of horizontal or vertical bars, often along stairs, balconies, or edges.
2. verbPresent participle of rail: complaining or protesting bitterly about something.

Railing in a sentence

• noun

  She gripped the metal railing as she climbed the steep staircase.

• verb

  He spent the meeting railing against the new parking charges.

• noun

  The painters stripped and repainted the iron railing around the balcony.

• verb

  The columnist kept railing at the rising cost of housing.

Where does railing come from?

Language of origin: French

The noun comes from the word 'rail', a horizontal bar, which English took from the Old French 'reille' meaning a bar or rod. That French word traces back to the Latin 'regula', meaning a straight stick or ruler, the same root that gives us 'regular' and 'rule'; the underlying idea is something straight and ordered. By the 1300s 'rail' described any fixed bar, and adding the suffix '-ing' produced 'railing', a collective term for an assembly of such bars forming a barrier or fence. A quite separate verb 'rail', meaning to complain bitterly, arrived later from the Old French 'railler' (to mock or jest); its participle 'railing' looks identical but is unrelated in origin. Because the spelling simply joins 'rail' and '-ing' with no doubled letter, it is one of the more transparent words to write.

How the word is built

• rail (bar/rod)
• -ing (noun suffix denoting a thing made of)