Showering

How to spell showering

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce showering

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does showering mean?

1. verbWashing the body while standing under a spray of water.
2. verbPouring or scattering something on someone in great quantity.

Showering in a sentence

• He was still showering when the doorbell rang.

• The crowd kept showering the champions with confetti and praise.

• The hotel charged extra for guests showering after checkout.

• Relatives spent the afternoon showering the new baby with gifts.

Where does showering come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word grows from the Old English noun scur, which meant a short fall of rain, hail, or snow, and the related verb sense of rain coming down. The root reaches back to a shared Germanic ancestor, with close relatives in Old High German scur and Old Norse skur, all pointing to the same idea of a sudden downpour. Over the medieval period the spelling drifted toward the modern form, and the vowel cluster 'ow' settled in to capture the diphthong heard in 'now'. The figurative use, meaning to pour or sprinkle something in abundance the way rain falls, developed naturally from the literal weather sense. The everyday meaning of washing oneself under a spray of water is comparatively recent, arriving with the plumbing fixture we call a shower in the nineteenth century. The trickiest part of the spelling is simply remembering the single internal 'w' and the plain '-er' before the '-ing' ending.

How the word is built

• shower (from Old English scur: a brief fall of rain)
• -ing (present participle suffix)