Sliding

How to spell sliding

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce sliding

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does sliding mean?

1. verbMoving smoothly along a surface, or changing gradually from one level to another.

Sliding in a sentence

• The children kept sliding down the icy path on the way to school.

• The company uses a sliding scale of fees based on household income.

Where does sliding come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Sliding is the present participle of the verb slide, which comes from the Old English slidan, meaning 'to glide, slip, or move smoothly over a surface'. That word belonged to a wider family of Germanic terms for slippery movement, and it is closely related to the same root that gives English 'slither' and 'sledge'. The base sense has always involved smooth, continuous motion across something, whether ice, a slope, or a track, and from that physical idea came figurative uses such as a sliding scale of charges or prices that slide downward. The spelling drops the silent e of slide before the -ing ending, which is the small trap here: writers sometimes wrongly keep the e or double the d. The single d and the missing e both follow the regular English rule for verbs ending in a silent e.

How the word is built

• slid- (from slide: to glide smoothly)
• -ing (present participle / verbal noun suffix)