Sniffing

How to spell sniffing

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce sniffing

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does sniffing mean?

1. verbDrawing air audibly through the nose, often to detect a smell or because of a cold.

Sniffing in a sentence

• The dog kept sniffing at the bottom of the kitchen door.

• She was sniffing throughout the meeting because of her cold.

Where does sniffing come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The base word sniff is what linguists call an echoic or imitative formation, meaning it was coined to mimic the actual sound of drawing air sharply through the nose. It appears in English from around the fourteenth century and is closely related to a family of similar nasal-sound words such as snuff, snivel, and snort, which share the expressive 'sn-' opening common to words about the nose and breathing. Comparable forms turn up across the Germanic languages, including Scandinavian dialects, which is why the word feels at home in everyday English. The present participle sniffing simply adds the standard -ing ending to sniff, and the spelling keeps both letters of the doubled 'ff' from the base word. Because the root ends in a single short vowel followed by 'ff', no extra doubling is needed when -ing is added, so the only trap is remembering the original double 'f'.

How the word is built

• sniff (imitative root)
• -ing (present participle suffix)