Rehearsing

How to spell rehearsing

10 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce rehearsing

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does rehearsing mean?

1. verbPractising a play, speech, performance, or routine in preparation for a public presentation.

Rehearsing in a sentence

• The cast spent the whole evening rehearsing the opening scene.

• She kept rehearsing her wedding speech until the words felt natural.

Where does rehearsing come from?

Language of origin: French

This word descends from the verb 'rehearse', which English borrowed in the 1300s from the Old French rehercier, meaning 'to go over again' or 'to repeat'. That French verb was built from the prefix re-, meaning 'again', and hercier, 'to harrow or rake', from herce, a 'harrow', the toothed farming implement dragged repeatedly over a field; the underlying source is the Latin hirpicem, a large agricultural rake. The literal image was therefore of raking the same ground over and over, which shifted naturally into the figurative sense of going over words or actions repeatedly until they are ready. By extension it came to mean practising a play, speech, or piece of music before a performance. The same humble 'harrow' root surprisingly also gave us the word 'hearse', which once named a triangular harrow-shaped frame for holding candles over a coffin. The hidden trap in the spelling is that the word contains the everyday word 'hear', and writers often drop the silent middle and the 'a', so it helps to remember the buried 'hearse'.

How the word is built

• re- (again)
• hearse (from Old French hercier: to rake over, repeat)
• -ing (present participle)