Stumbling

How to spell stumbling

9 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce stumbling

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does stumbling mean?

1. verbTripping or moving unsteadily on foot, or, figuratively, faltering and making mistakes.

Stumbling in a sentence

• The toddler kept stumbling over the loose corner of the rug.

• He was stumbling through the dark hallway looking for the light switch.

Where does stumbling come from?

Language of origin: Old Norse

This is the present participle of the verb 'stumble', which appears in Middle English as 'stumblen' and almost certainly came from a Scandinavian source carried over by Norse settlers. It is closely tied to Old Norse words in the 'stum-' family meaning to be hindered, blocked, or made to falter, and it shares an ancestry with 'stammer', where the tongue trips much as the feet do. The intrusive 'b' that sits between the 'm' and the 'l' was inserted for ease of pronunciation, a common English habit also seen in words like 'thimble' and 'humble', and it is exactly that unsounded-looking 'b' plus the dropped final 'e' of 'stumble' that makes the spelling worth fixing in memory. The original sense was the literal one of tripping while walking, and the figurative meaning of faltering in speech or making an error developed naturally alongside it. By the late medieval period the word was firmly established in English in both its physical and its figurative uses.

How the word is built

• stumbl- (from stumble: to trip or falter)
• -ing (present participle / gerund suffix)