Splitting

How to spell splitting

9 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce splitting

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does splitting mean?

1. verbThe act of dividing something into two or more parts or shares.
2. adjectiveExtremely severe or intense, especially describing a headache.

Splitting in a sentence

• verb

  Splitting the restaurant bill evenly saved everyone time.

• adjective

  She woke with a splitting headache after the long flight.

• verb

  The carpenter was splitting the logs along the grain.

• adjective

  The loud music left him with a splitting pain behind his eyes.

Where does splitting come from?

Language of origin: Dutch

The base verb 'split' first surfaces in English in the late 1500s and was borrowed from Dutch and Low German seafaring speech, where 'splitten' meant to cause a ship to break apart on rocks. The root is Germanic and is related to the idea of cleaving or bursting open along a line. As the word settled into general use, it broadened from the violent splintering of timber and hulls to any clean division into parts, and the present participle 'splitting' followed naturally. The spelling trap lives in that doubled letter: because 'split' is a short, stressed syllable ending in a single consonant, the 't' doubles before the '-ing' ending, giving 'splitting' rather than the wrong 'spliting'. The same doubling rule that governs 'sit' becoming 'sitting' and 'cut' becoming 'cutting' is exactly what produces this spelling.

How the word is built

• split (root, from Old Norse/Middle Low German 'to cleave')
• doubled -t-
• -ing (present participle/gerund suffix)