Seating

How to spell seating

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce seating

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does seating mean?

1. nounThe seats provided in a place, or the way people are arranged in them.

Seating in a sentence

• The restaurant offers outdoor seating during the summer months.

• The wedding planner finalised the seating chart a week before the ceremony.

Where does seating come from?

Language of origin: Old Norse

The base word 'seat' came into English from Old Norse 'saeti', meaning 'a place to sit', which Norse-speaking settlers brought to Britain during the Viking age; it gradually displaced or sat alongside related native words. The Norse root traces back to a Germanic stem connected to 'sit', and the same family gives us 'set' and 'settle'. By adding the productive English suffix '-ing', which turns a verb or noun into a word naming an activity or the result of one, English formed 'seating' to mean the action of placing people in seats or, more commonly, the provision and arrangement of seats themselves. The spelling keeps the clear 'ea' of 'seat', so the only thing to remember is the single 't' before '-ing', since 'seat' ends in just one t.

How the word is built

• seat (a place to sit)
• -ing (noun/gerund suffix)