Speeding
nounThe act of driving a vehicle faster than the legal limit.
How to spell speeding
8 letters · 2 syllables
How to pronounce speeding
Say the part in capitals loudest.
What does speeding mean?
- nounThe act of driving a vehicle faster than the legal limit.
- verbMoving or travelling very fast.
Speeding in a sentence
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noun
He was fined two hundred pounds for speeding on the motorway.
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verb
The train was speeding through the countryside at full pace.
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noun
The new cameras are meant to cut down on speeding near the school.
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verb
Clouds were speeding across the sky ahead of the storm.
Where does speeding come from?
Language of origin: Germanic
The base word 'speed' descends from the Old English 'sped', which originally meant success, prosperity, or good fortune rather than quickness; to do something with 'sped' was to do it luckily or well. It belongs to a Germanic family of words, with relatives such as Dutch 'spoed' meaning haste. Over the medieval period the sense shifted from 'success' to the swiftness needed to achieve it, so 'speed' came to mean rapid motion. The verb 'speed' picked up the participle ending '-ing' to form 'speeding', and by the age of motor cars this gerund had acquired its modern legal flavour: driving faster than the law allows. The old 'good fortune' meaning survives only faintly in the farewell phrase 'Godspeed', a reminder of where the word began.
How the word is built
- speed (to move fast)
- -ing (present participle / gerund suffix)
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