Showing

How to spell showing

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce showing

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does showing mean?

1. verbPresent participle of 'show': displaying, revealing, or making something visible.
2. nounAn act of presenting or exhibiting something, or a performance or result judged by quality.

Showing in a sentence

• verb

  The museum is showing a new collection of photographs this month.

• noun

  The gallery arranged a private showing of the artist's latest work.

• verb

  The report kept showing the same errors in every section.

• noun

  The team made a strong showing in the first round of the tournament.

Where does showing come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the -ing form of the verb 'show', which descends from the Old English sceawian, meaning 'to look at', 'to behold', or 'to inspect'. That early sense was about the act of looking rather than displaying, and it shares a Germanic root with the Dutch schouwen and the German schauen, both still meaning 'to view' or 'to inspect'. Over the medieval period the English meaning flipped from 'to look' to 'to cause something to be seen', which is the sense we recognise today. The -ing ending, an old and very productive English suffix, turns the verb into both a present participle ('she is showing') and a noun ('a private showing'). The spelling is mostly regular, but writers occasionally trip on the single 'w' followed directly by '-ing' with no extra 'e', since the silent 'e' some expect from the base form is simply absent.

How the word is built

• show (from Old English sceawian: to look at, behold)
• -ing (present participle / noun suffix)