Shopping

How to spell shopping

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce shopping

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does shopping mean?

1. nounThe activity of visiting shops or websites to look at and buy goods.
2. verbThe present participle of 'shop': in the process of buying or browsing for goods.

Shopping in a sentence

• noun

  The weekly shopping took longer than expected because the supermarket was busy.

• verb

  He was shopping for a new winter coat when his phone rang.

• noun

  Online shopping now accounts for most of their household purchases.

• verb

  They spent the afternoon shopping around different banks for a better rate.

Where does shopping come from?

Language of origin: French

This word grows from 'shop', which entered English from the Old French 'eschoppe', meaning a lean-to booth or stall, itself drawn from a Germanic root related to a small enclosed structure or porch. In medieval English a shop was a workshop or a tradesman's stall where goods were made and sold. The verb 'to shop', meaning to visit shops to buy or examine goods, did not appear until the eighteenth century, and 'shopping' as the name for that activity followed soon after. The spelling doubles the final 'p' because 'shop' is a short, stressed single-syllable word ending in a single consonant; English consistently doubles such consonants before '-ing', which is the same rule that gives us 'stopping' and 'running'. That doubling is the only real trap here: forgetting it produces the misreading 'shoping'.

How the word is built

• shop (a place of trade / to buy goods)
• -p- (doubled consonant)
• -ing (verbal noun / present participle suffix)