Shuffling

How to spell shuffling

9 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce shuffling

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does shuffling mean?

1. verbWalking by dragging the feet, or moving people or things around in a slow, untidy way.
2. verbMixing a deck of playing cards into a random order before dealing.

Shuffling in a sentence

• The tired commuters were shuffling slowly toward the exit.

• She was shuffling the deck before dealing the next hand.

• He kept shuffling his papers around the desk instead of filing them.

• The dealer kept shuffling the cards while the players placed their bets.

Where does shuffling come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Shuffling is the -ing form of the verb shuffle, which surfaced in English in the middle of the 1500s. The root is Germanic and is closely tied to shove and to scuffle; a likely relative is the Low German schuffeln, meaning to walk clumsily, to drag, or to mix together carelessly. The literal early sense was the dragging, scraping movement of feet across a floor, and from there it spread to mean pushing playing cards about to mix them, and later to moving objects or people around without much care. The doubled f, the spot where adults usually stumble, simply mirrors the short, stressed vowel in the first syllable, the same pattern seen in shuffle, scuffle, and ruffle. Because the family is native and informal rather than borrowed from Latin or French, the spelling has stayed plain and phonetic apart from that double consonant.

How the word is built

• shuffle (to drag or mix)
• -ing (present participle/gerund)