Spotting

How to spell spotting

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce spotting

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does spotting mean?

1. verbThe act of catching sight of or identifying something, often something hard to see.
2. verbStanding ready to support a person lifting weights so they do not get hurt.

Spotting in a sentence

• Spotting a typo in the contract saved the company from an awkward error.

• A trainer was spotting him during the heavy bench press.

• She has a talent for spotting rare birds in dense woodland.

• Good spotting keeps a lifter safe when the bar gets too heavy.

Where does spotting come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the present participle of the verb 'spot', which grew out of the noun 'spot', meaning a small mark or stain. The noun appears in Middle English around the 1100s and is thought to come from a Germanic source, with close relatives in Middle Dutch 'spotte' and Old Norse, all carrying the idea of a small blemish or speck. By the late 1500s 'spot' had taken on the verbal sense of marking something with spots, and by the 1700s it had developed the figurative meaning of picking something out by eye, as if catching a single mark among many. The doubled 't' in 'spotting' follows the regular English rule that a short, stressed vowel before a single final consonant doubles that consonant when '-ing' is added, which is also why we write 'spotted' and 'spotty'. Forgetting that doubling, and writing 'spoting', is the usual spelling slip.

How the word is built

• spot (a mark, or to catch sight of)
• doubled t
• -ing (present participle / gerund suffix)