Sitting

How to spell sitting

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce sitting

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does sitting mean?

1. verbThe present participle of sit: resting with the body supported on the buttocks, or being in a seated position.
2. nounA continuous period devoted to a single activity, such as a meal service, a portrait, or a formal session.

Sitting in a sentence

• verb

  The cat was sitting quietly on the warm windowsill.

• noun

  Dinner was served in two shifts, and we booked the early sitting.

• verb

  After a long flight, sitting still for another hour felt unbearable.

• noun

  The artist finished the portrait after only one sitting.

Where does sitting come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The word grows directly from the native Old English verb sittan, meaning 'to be seated' or 'to rest on a surface', which traces back to a shared Germanic root that also gave German sitzen and Dutch zitten. That same ancient root, reconstructed as something like 'sed', meaning 'to sit', is one of the most productive in the language and quietly underlies a surprising family of borrowed words, including 'seat', 'settle', 'saddle', and even Latin-derived 'sedentary' and 'session'. The form 'sitting' is the ordinary present participle, formed by adding the suffix -ing, and from the late Middle Ages it also hardened into a noun meaning a continuous period of being seated, as for a portrait, a meal service, or a formal session. The spelling trap is simple but persistent: because the verb ends in a short stressed vowel followed by a single 't', that 't' doubles before -ing, giving 'sitting' rather than 'siting'. Keeping that doubled 't' in mind is the whole game, since the single-t 'siting' is a real but unrelated word about placing something on a site.

How the word is built

• sit (Old English sittan: to be seated)
• -t- (doubled consonant)
• -ing (present participle/noun suffix)