Spoiling

How to spell spoiling

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce spoiling

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does spoiling mean?

1. verbDamaging or ruining something so that it is no longer good, useful, or enjoyable.
2. verbTreating someone with excessive kindness or indulgence, often to the point of harming their character.

Spoiling in a sentence

• The constant noise from the road was spoiling our holiday.

• The grandparents enjoyed spoiling the children with sweets and toys.

• Leaving milk out of the fridge is a sure way of spoiling it.

• She admitted to spoiling the new puppy far too much.

Where does spoiling come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The base verb spoil traces back to the Latin spoliare, which meant to strip, to rob, or to plunder, and that verb was built on the noun spolium, originally the hide or skin stripped from a slain animal and later any booty seized in war. English took the word in the early 1300s through Old French espoillier, and at first it carried that same violent sense of stripping someone of goods by force, a meaning still visible in phrases like the spoils of war. Over the centuries the everyday sense softened from plundering to simply marring, ruining, or letting something go bad, and a separate branch grew to mean over-indulging a person until their character is harmed. The -ing ending here is just the ordinary present-participle suffix added to spoil, so the spelling trap is really the oi vowel pairing inherited from the French form rather than the ending. Knowing that the word once meant to strip bare can make the modern sense of ruining or going off feel less arbitrary.

How the word is built

• spoil (from Latin spoliare: to strip, plunder)
• -ing (present participle suffix)