Roasting

How to spell roasting

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce roasting

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does roasting mean?

1. verbCooking food, especially meat or vegetables, with dry heat in an oven or over a fire.
2. adjectiveUncomfortably or extremely hot.
3. nounA severe and often public criticism or telling-off.

Roasting in a sentence

• verb

  The lamb is roasting slowly in the oven for the family dinner.

• adjective

  It was roasting hot on the crowded train platform this afternoon.

• noun

  His manager gave him a roasting for missing the project deadline.

• verb

  She spent the morning roasting vegetables with olive oil and herbs.

• adjective

  The office felt roasting because the air conditioning had broken down.

• noun

  The new film got a thorough roasting from the newspaper critics.

Where does roasting come from?

Language of origin: French

The base word 'roast' came into English in the 1200s from the Old French 'rostir', meaning to cook meat by exposing it to fire or dry heat. That French verb was itself built on a Germanic root, the Frankish 'raustjan', linked to words for a grate or gridiron on which food was scorched. Over the centuries the literal cooking sense broadened: by the 1700s 'roasting' could describe anything fiercely hot, and by the 1900s it picked up the slang sense of giving someone a severe verbal scorching. The spelling stays comfortably regular, with the long 'oa' of 'roast' carried straight into the '-ing' form, so the main thing to remember is that no letter doubles when the suffix is added. The same root survives in the kitchen noun 'roast' and in the comedy tradition of the celebrity 'roast'.

How the word is built

• roast (to cook with dry heat)
• -ing (present participle / gerund suffix)