Staring

How to spell staring

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce staring

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does staring mean?

1. verbLooking at someone or something with a fixed, unmoving gaze.

Staring in a sentence

• The toddler kept staring at the bright balloons in the shop window.

• He sat staring blankly at his computer screen, unable to focus on the report.

Where does staring come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the present participle of the verb 'stare', which descends from the Old English 'starian', meaning 'to gaze fixedly' or 'to look rigidly'. That word belongs to a wider Germanic family: related forms turn up in Old High German 'staren' and Old Norse 'stara', all carrying the idea of a fixed, unmoving look, and the same root is thought to connect with the notion of stiffness or rigidity (compare 'stark'). The single 'r' is the spelling trap here, because adding '-ing' to 'stare' simply drops the silent final 'e' to give 'staring'; doubling the 'r' would instead produce 'starring', the entirely different word about appearing in a film. The reason no doubling happens is that the stress and the long vowel are signalled by the surviving vowel pattern, so 'stare' keeps its shape and just loses the 'e'.

How the word is built

• stare (to gaze fixedly)
• -ing (present participle suffix)