Routing

How to spell routing

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce routing

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does routing mean?

1. verbThe act of sending people, goods, or data along a chosen path or course.
2. verbThe act of cutting a groove or shaping an edge in wood using a router tool.

Routing in a sentence

• The logistics team handles the routing of every delivery van across the region.

• The routing of the cabinet edges gave each door a smooth decorative profile.

• Poor routing of the network traffic slowed the office connection to a crawl.

• He wore goggles during the routing because the spinning bit threw out chips of oak.

Where does routing come from?

Language of origin: Latin

Routing is the gerund of the verb 'route', which traces back through Old French 'rute' to the Latin phrase 'rupta via', meaning a 'broken way', that is, a path forced or cut through difficult country. The underlying verb was 'rumpere', 'to break', the same root that gives English 'rupture' and 'interrupt'. By the time it reached medieval French and then English in the 1200s, the sense had softened from a literally broken track to simply a regular course of travel. The verbal sense, sending something along a chosen path, grew naturally from the noun, and 'routing' became common in the railway and postal age before being adopted wholesale by telephone, computer, and network engineering in the twentieth century. The spelling keeps the full 'route' base, so the trap is remembering the silent-ish 'e' that drops before '-ing' yet still leaves 'rout' looking deceptively like the unrelated word for a crushing defeat.

How the word is built

• rout/route (a way or course)
• -ing (present participle / verbal noun)

Words that sound like routing

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• rooting: Digging or rummaging around in search of something.