Selling

How to spell selling

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce selling

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does selling mean?

1. verbExchanging goods or services for money, or persuading someone to buy.
2. nounThe activity or business of persuading people to buy goods or services.

Selling in a sentence

• verb

  The shop is selling winter coats at half price this week.

• noun

  A career in selling rewards people who can build trust quickly.

• verb

  She enjoys selling insurance because she likes meeting new clients.

• noun

  The company offers training in selling to all new staff.

Where does selling come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The base word comes from the Old English sellan, which originally meant 'to give' or 'to hand over' rather than specifically to exchange for money. In Anglo-Saxon usage you could 'sell' a gift freely, and the narrower commercial sense of trading goods for payment only sharpened over the medieval period. The root belongs to a wider Germanic family; related forms appear across the old northern languages with the general idea of handing something to another person. The modern present participle 'selling' simply adds the productive -ing ending to that ancient verb. Because the base already ends in a doubled L, writers rarely add a wrong consonant, which keeps the spelling reassuringly stable.

How the word is built

• sell (root: to give in exchange for money)
• -ing (present participle/gerund suffix)