Seeing

How to spell seeing

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce seeing

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does seeing mean?

1. verbThe present participle or gerund of see: perceiving with the eyes, or the act of doing so.
2. conjunctionUsed to introduce a reason, meaning 'given that' or 'since', typically as 'seeing as' or 'seeing that'.

Seeing in a sentence

• verb

  After seeing the damage to the roof, the insurer approved the claim.

• conjunction

  Seeing as it was already past midnight, they postponed the meeting.

• verb

  She kept seeing the same error in the spreadsheet every month.

• conjunction

  Seeing that the road was closed, the driver took the longer route home.

Where does seeing come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the present participle of the verb 'see', which descends directly from the Old English verb seon, meaning 'to perceive with the eyes, to look, or to understand'. That verb traces back to a common Germanic source shared with the Dutch zien and the German sehen, all carrying the basic sense of visual perception. The -ing ending is the native English suffix that turns a verb into its ongoing form or into a noun naming the action, so 'seeing' is simply the act or state of seeing. Over the centuries the word also developed a connective use, as in 'seeing that' or 'seeing as', where it means roughly 'given that' or 'since', a sense that grew naturally from the idea of recognising or observing a fact. The doubled e in the spelling is the only real trap: it comes from adding -ing to a stem that already ends in a long ee sound, so both vowels stay.

How the word is built

• see (root, from Old English seon 'to perceive with the eyes')
• -ing (present participle and gerund suffix)