Sealing

How to spell sealing

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce sealing

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does sealing mean?

1. verbClosing something firmly so that air, water, or contents cannot pass; the present participle and gerund of 'seal'.
2. nounA hard wax, used as a modifier, that is melted to fasten or stamp a closure, as in 'sealing wax'.

Sealing in a sentence

• verb

  Sealing the envelope properly stops the documents from falling out in the post.

• noun

  She pressed her family crest into the warm red sealing wax on the letter.

• verb

  He spent the afternoon sealing the gaps around the window frames to keep out draughts.

• noun

  The antique shop sold sticks of sealing wax beside the brass stamps.

Where does sealing come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word is the -ing form of the verb 'seal', which traces back to the Latin sigillum, a diminutive of signum meaning 'sign' or 'mark'; a sigillum was literally a 'little sign', the small figured stamp pressed into wax to authenticate a document. The noun passed into Old French as 'seel' and entered English in the 1200s, naming both the engraved device and the blob of wax it left behind. From the idea of fixing wax over a join, the verb soon broadened to mean closing something completely or making it airtight or watertight. The everyday spelling trap is that 'sealing' sounds identical to 'ceiling', the overhead surface of a room, yet 'ceiling' comes from a different route entirely (Old French 'celer', to conceal or line), so the ea spelling here belongs to the wax-and-closing family. Remembering that a 'seal' closes a gap keeps the ea firmly in place.

How the word is built

• seal (to close tightly, from Latin sigillum 'small image, seal')
• -ing (verb/noun suffix)

Words that sound like sealing

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

• ceiling: The upper interior surface of a room, opposite the floor.