Sailing

How to spell sailing

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce sailing

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does sailing mean?

1. nounThe activity or sport of travelling on water in a boat powered by sails.
2. verbThe present participle of sail: moving across water under the power of wind or, by extension, a vessel departing.

Sailing in a sentence

• noun

  Sailing has become her favourite weekend hobby on the coast.

• verb

  The ferry is sailing across the channel at noon.

• noun

  He booked a sailing holiday around the Greek islands.

• verb

  The yacht was sailing smoothly through the calm harbour.

Where does sailing come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The root sail comes from the Old English segl, a noun naming the piece of cloth that catches the wind to drive a boat, and the related verb seglian, meaning to travel by means of such a cloth. These belong to a wider Germanic family, with cousins like the Dutch zeil and the German Segel, all pointing back to a shared ancestor for a sheet of fabric used to harness the wind. The -ing ending is the ordinary native English suffix that turns a verb into the name of the activity or the ongoing action, so sailing literally means the doing of sail. The spelling has stayed remarkably stable because both parts are plain Old English, and the only mild trap is remembering the silent-feeling 'i' in the 'ai' that gives the long A sound. The word has described the practical business of moving ships for over a thousand years, and only later did it also come to mean the leisure sport enjoyed for its own sake.

How the word is built

• sail (to travel on water by wind)
• -ing (forming a noun/present participle)