Slamming

How to spell slamming

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce slamming

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does slamming mean?

1. verbShutting or striking something with sudden violent force, often making a loud bang.
2. verbCriticising a person or thing very harshly, especially in public.

Slamming in a sentence

• He stormed out, slamming the front door behind him.

• The review spent three paragraphs slamming the restaurant's slow service.

• The toddler kept slamming the cupboard lids until they cracked.

• Commentators were slamming the policy within hours of its announcement.

Where does slamming come from?

Language of origin: Old Norse

Slam is first recorded in English in the late 1600s, and it almost certainly arrived from a Scandinavian source: compare the Norwegian and Swedish dialect word 'slamra', meaning to bang or to make a clattering noise, and related Old Norse forms. The word is partly imitative, its very sound echoing the sharp crash of a door or lid being shut hard, which is why so many noisy, percussive verbs in English begin with the 'sl-' cluster. The earliest English uses described striking or shutting something with violent force, and from there the sense broadened into slamming a car door, slamming a phone down, and figuratively slamming someone with harsh criticism. The form 'slamming' simply adds the participle ending '-ing', and the spelling trap lives entirely in that join: because 'slam' ends in a single consonant after one short stressed vowel, the m must double before '-ing', giving the double-m of slamming rather than the single m a writer might expect.

How the word is built

• slam (to shut or strike forcefully)
• -ming (present participle -ing, with the final m doubled after a short stressed vowel)