Siding

How to spell siding

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce siding

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does siding mean?

1. nounA short stretch of railway track connected to the main line, used for parking or passing trains.
2. nounBoards or panels fixed to the outside walls of a building as a protective and decorative covering.

Siding in a sentence

• The freight cars were shunted onto a siding to let the express pass.

• They replaced the rotting wooden siding on the front of the house with vinyl.

• The old goods siding behind the station has been torn up for car parking.

• The contractor quoted us a high price to install new siding around the whole property.

Where does siding come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word grows straight out of the everyday English noun 'side', which descends from the Old English 'side', meaning the flank of a person or animal or the edge of a thing. The Germanic root carried the sense of something long and broad, the part that lies alongside. Adding the suffix '-ing' produced a noun naming material or a structure set along a side: in railways a 'siding' is a short track that runs to the side of the main line, a usage that appears in English from the early nineteenth century with the spread of the railway network. In North American building trade, the same logic gave 'siding' the meaning of the boards or panels fixed to the outside walls of a house, the covering that runs along its sides. The spelling is simple once you remember it keeps the silent 'e' of 'side' only in pronunciation, not on paper: the 'e' is dropped before '-ing', leaving 'siding' rather than 'sideing'.

How the word is built

• side (flank, edge)
• -ing (noun suffix)