Stalling

How to spell stalling

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce stalling

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does stalling mean?

1. verbDeliberately delaying or playing for time to avoid acting or deciding.
2. verbWhen an engine or vehicle unexpectedly loses power and stops.

Stalling in a sentence

• The contractor kept stalling on the refund instead of paying us back.

• The old van kept stalling at every set of traffic lights.

• By stalling for an hour, she gave her team time to prepare the report.

• Learning to pull away smoothly without stalling takes practice.

Where does stalling come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word grows from the Old English noun steall, which meant a standing place, a fixed position, or a stable for animals, and it has solid Germanic roots shared with the Dutch stal and the German Stall, all carrying that same idea of a place where something stands still. The sense of a market booth, where a trader takes a fixed standing position, also descends from this root. The verb meaning developed naturally from the idea of coming to a standstill: an engine that loses power or a vehicle that halts is said to stall, and from there came the figurative sense of deliberately stopping progress in order to gain time. The present participle stalling simply adds the -ing ending to that verb, and the double l is the easy spelling trap, since the single base stall already ends in two l letters that must be kept before the suffix.

How the word is built

• stall (from Old English steall: a standing place)
• -ing (present participle / gerund)