Spilling

How to spell spilling

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce spilling

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does spilling mean?

1. verbLetting a liquid or loose substance run or fall out of its container, usually by accident.
2. verbSpreading beyond a normal boundary, as a crowd or light moving past where it should stop.

Spilling in a sentence

• The toddler kept spilling juice across the freshly mopped floor.

• The festival crowd was spilling out of the square and into the side streets.

• He carried the overfull mug carefully to avoid spilling coffee on his shirt.

• Warm light from the open door was spilling onto the dark patio.

Where does spilling come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the present participle of the verb 'spill', which descends from the Old English verb 'spillan', meaning 'to destroy, kill, or waste'. In its earliest life the word had a far more violent sense than today: to spill someone was to ruin or slay them, and to spill blood meant to shed it in battle. Over the medieval centuries the meaning softened from destroying to merely letting something escape or run out, especially a liquid, so that by the 1500s spilling water or wine carried its familiar modern sense. The word is Germanic to its core, with relatives in the Dutch 'spillen' and dialect German forms, and shares no link with the unrelated 'spell'. The doubled 'l' in the spelling follows the regular English rule for a short stressed vowel: a one-syllable word ending in a single vowel plus 'l' doubles that 'l' before adding '-ing', which is why 'spill' becomes 'spilling' and not 'spiling'.

How the word is built

• spill (Old English spillan: to destroy, waste, shed)
• -ing (present participle suffix)