Rubbing

How to spell rubbing

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce rubbing

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does rubbing mean?

1. verbThe act of moving something back and forth against a surface with pressure.
2. nounAn image made by laying paper over an engraved or raised surface and rubbing it with pencil or chalk.

Rubbing in a sentence

• verb

  Rubbing the stain with a damp cloth lifted most of it.

• noun

  He framed a brass rubbing taken from the old church floor.

• verb

  She soothed the ache by gently rubbing her shoulder.

• noun

  The museum sells a rubbing of the medieval tomb inscription.

Where does rubbing come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the present participle and gerund of the verb 'rub', which appears in English as 'rubben' during the Middle English period, around the 1300s. Its earlier history is genuinely murky, but it is generally linked to Low German and Dutch words such as 'rubben' and 'robben', meaning to scrape, scour, or rub, so the family is broadly Germanic. The core idea has always been the same: moving one surface firmly against another. When the suffix '-ing' was added to form the verbal noun, the single 'b' was doubled, following the standard English rule that a short stressed vowel before a final single consonant doubles that consonant before '-ing'; this is exactly the spelling trap, since writers sometimes leave only one 'b'. The same doubling logic governs 'running', 'swimming', and 'hugging'. A separate noun sense, an impression taken by rubbing a pencil over paper laid on an engraved surface, grew up later from this same root.

How the word is built

• rub (to move with pressure against a surface)
• -b- (doubled consonant)
• -ing (verb/noun suffix)