Screwing

How to spell screwing

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce screwing

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does screwing mean?

1. verbFastening or tightening something by turning a screw or threaded part.
2. verbInformally, treating someone unfairly or cheating them out of money or value.

Screwing in a sentence

• He spent the afternoon screwing the new hinges onto the cabinet door.

• Customers complained that the airline was screwing them with hidden baggage charges.

• The engineer was carefully screwing the cap back onto the radiator.

• The contractors felt the developer was screwing them on the final payment.

Where does screwing come from?

Language of origin: French

The base word screw arrived in English in the fifteenth century from the Old French escroue, which meant the nut or female thread that a screw turns into rather than the bolt itself. The French term is thought to descend from the Latin scrofa, literally 'a breeding sow', a comic reference to the spiralling shape of a pig's tail that supposedly resembled a thread; some scholars instead trace it to Latin scrobis, meaning 'a ditch or groove'. From the literal twisting motion the verb gathered a host of figurative senses, including pressing or squeezing someone hard, and eventually the informal idea of cheating a person out of what they are owed. The present participle simply adds the regular -ing ending to screw, and because the root ends in a vowel sound the spelling keeps its full -ew before the suffix, with no doubling and no dropped letter.

How the word is built

• screw (root: a threaded fastener; to twist)
• -ing (present participle/gerund suffix)