Snowing

How to spell snowing

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce snowing

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does snowing mean?

1. verbFalling from the sky as snow; the action of snow coming down.

Snowing in a sentence

• It was snowing heavily when the flight was cancelled.

• The forecast warns it will be snowing across the hills by morning.

Where does snowing come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The base word snow comes from the Old English snaw, the native Anglo-Saxon term for the white flakes of frozen water that fall from the sky. It belongs to a wide family of Germanic relatives, including the German Schnee and the Dutch sneeuw, and stretches back to an ancient Indo-European root meaning 'to snow' that also gave Latin its nix and nivis. The verb form, meaning 'to fall as snow', has been in use for as long as the noun, since people naturally spoke of the weather doing the action. Adding the ordinary present participle ending -ing turns it into snowing, the form used to describe weather happening right now. The spelling is reassuringly regular: the silent w that English keeps in many ow words (know, grow, blow) stays put, and no letter is doubled because the word ends in a vowel sound before the suffix.

How the word is built

• snow (frozen precipitation)
• -ing (present participle suffix)