Sucking

How to spell sucking

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce sucking

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does sucking mean?

1. verbDrawing in liquid, air, or an object by creating suction, typically with the mouth or a pump.

Sucking in a sentence

• The baby was sucking its thumb throughout the afternoon nap.

• The pump kept sucking muddy water out of the flooded basement.

Where does sucking come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the present participle of the verb 'suck', which descends from the Old English 'sucan', meaning 'to draw liquid into the mouth'. That verb belongs to a wide family of Germanic relatives, and beyond them lies an imitative Indo-European root that simply echoed the sound of drawing in liquid, much as words like 'sip' and 'sup' still do. Because the base is so old and native, the spelling stayed plain: a hard 'ck' before the regular '-ing' ending, with no silent letters or doubled trickery. The single point worth noting is that the 'ck' already closes the short vowel, so no extra consonant is doubled when '-ing' is added, unlike words such as 'running'. The everyday sense, drawing in by mouth or by suction, has remained remarkably stable for well over a thousand years.

How the word is built

• suck (draw in by mouth or suction)
• -ing (present participle/gerund suffix)