Sipping

How to spell sipping

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce sipping

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does sipping mean?

1. verbDrinking a liquid slowly, in small mouthfuls.

Sipping in a sentence

• She sat by the window sipping her morning coffee.

• He kept sipping the hot soup so it would not burn his tongue.

Where does sipping come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the present participle of the verb 'sip', a word that has been in English since the late Middle Ages, with the earliest written examples appearing around the 1300s. Its exact ancestry is a little uncertain, but it is generally thought to come from the same Germanic family as Low German 'sippen', meaning to taste or to drink in tiny amounts, and it is closely related to 'sup' and 'sop'. The core idea has always been about drinking slowly and in very small quantities, as opposed to gulping. The spelling trap lives entirely in the suffix: because 'sip' ends in a single short vowel followed by a single consonant, that final 'p' doubles before '-ing', giving the double-p of 'sipping' rather than 'siping'. Keeping that doubled consonant in mind is the key to spelling it correctly.

How the word is built

• sip (to drink in small mouthfuls)
• -p- (doubled consonant before suffix)
• -ing (present participle)