Sounding

How to spell sounding

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce sounding

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does sounding mean?

1. verbPresent participle of sound: producing or emitting a noise.
2. nounA measurement of the depth of water, or the act of taking such a measurement.

Sounding in a sentence

• verb

  The fire alarm kept sounding until the engineer finally reset it.

• noun

  The navigator recorded each sounding in the logbook before the ship entered the harbour.

• verb

  The church bell was still sounding when the latecomers slipped into their pews.

• noun

  The crew took a careful sounding to be sure the channel was deep enough.

Where does sounding come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word grows from 'sound' in the sense of audible noise, which English took in the thirteenth century from Old French 'son' and 'soun', themselves from the Latin 'sonus', meaning a noise or a tone. The intrusive 'd' at the end of 'sound' was never in the Latin or French; it crept in during the late Middle Ages as an English habit of strengthening words that ended in 'n' (the same drift that turned 'lend' from 'lene'), and that stray 'd' is the only mild surprise in the spelling. Once 'sound' was a settled English verb, adding the ordinary '-ing' suffix produced 'sounding' for the act of making noise. A separate but identical-looking 'sound' (the nautical verb meaning to measure water depth) came independently from Old French 'sonder', so the maritime noun 'a sounding' shares the spelling by coincidence rather than by family. The everyday word is therefore very regular, with the silent-built 'd' being its only quirk.

How the word is built

• sound (noise; from Latin sonus)
• -ing (verb/noun suffix forming the participle and gerund)