Sizing

How to spell sizing

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce sizing

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does sizing mean?

1. verbMeasuring, sorting, or judging something according to its dimensions or scale.
2. nounA glutinous solution or paste used to fill the surface of paper, fabric, or plaster, or to stiffen cloth.

Sizing in a sentence

• verb

  The staff spent the morning sizing the parcels by weight before dispatch.

• noun

  The artist brushed a coat of sizing onto the raw canvas before painting.

• verb

  The recruiter was quietly sizing up each candidate during the interview.

• noun

  Cheaper paper absorbs ink badly because it lacks enough sizing.

Where does sizing come from?

Language of origin: French

This word is built on the noun and verb 'size', which English took from Old French in the 1300s. The Old French word 'sise' was a clipped form of 'assise', meaning 'a sitting' or, more usefully, 'an assessment, an ordinance, a fixed standard', and that in turn came from the Latin verb 'assidere', 'to sit beside' (from 'ad', meaning 'to', and 'sedere', meaning 'to sit'). The link to sitting survives in the legal term 'assize', a court session, and the idea of a 'fixed standard set by sitting in council' gradually narrowed to mean the fixed dimensions of a thing, which is the modern sense of physical size. The technical 'sizing' that means a glaze or stiffening paste for paper and cloth comes from the same root, probably because such material set the proper finish or standard of a surface. Because the silent linking is invisible, the spelling trap is simply remembering the single 'z' and that the final 'e' of 'size' is dropped before '-ing'.

How the word is built

• size (from Old French sise/assise: an assessment or fixed measure)
• -ing (verbal noun/participle suffix)