Shortening

How to spell shortening

10 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce shortening

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does shortening mean?

1. nounThe act or process of making something less long in size, time, or extent.
2. nounSolid fat, such as lard or vegetable fat, used to make pastry and dough crumbly and tender.

Shortening in a sentence

• The shortening of the working week was welcomed by most staff.

• The recipe calls for two cups of flour and a generous spoon of shortening.

• A slight shortening of the cable solved the problem of the slack wire.

• She rubbed the cold shortening into the flour to make a flaky crust.

Where does shortening come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word traces back to the Old English adjective sceort, meaning 'brief' or 'not long', which is also the ancestor of the modern word 'short' and a distant relative of words tied to cutting and curtailing. By adding the suffix -en, English formed the verb 'shorten', literally 'to make short', following the same pattern seen in 'harden' and 'lengthen'. The further suffix -ing then turned that verb into the noun and participle 'shortening', describing the act of reducing length. The culinary sense, meaning the solid fat used in pastry, arose because such fat makes baked dough crumbly or 'short', a baker's term for a tender, easily broken texture. The spelling trap is the cluster of weak vowels in the middle: writers sometimes drop the -en- or double the wrong letter, when in fact it is simply short plus -en plus -ing with no doubling.

How the word is built

• short (Old English sceort: brief, not long)
• -en (verb-forming suffix: to make)
• -ing (forming a noun or present participle)