Surfing

How to spell surfing

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce surfing

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does surfing mean?

1. nounThe activity of riding breaking ocean waves while standing or lying on a board.
2. nounThe activity of moving casually from one website or channel to another.

Surfing in a sentence

• The coastal town is famous for its excellent surfing conditions.

• She spent the evening surfing news sites instead of working.

• He booked a week of surfing lessons during the summer holiday.

• The office blocks idle web surfing during busy periods.

Where does surfing come from?

Language of origin: Other

The base word 'surf' appears in English in the late 1600s, originally describing the foam and swell of the sea as it breaks on a shore. Its exact origin is genuinely uncertain: many scholars connect it to an earlier word 'suff', used by English sailors and traders in India for the rolling waves of the Indian coast, which may itself echo a local term. Over time the spelling drifted to 'surf', perhaps influenced by 'surge', the Latin-derived word for a rising swell of water. The verb 'to surf', meaning to ride those breaking waves on a board, grew up around the Hawaiian sport in the early twentieth century, and 'surfing' is simply that verb with the '-ing' ending. In the 1990s the word stretched again to cover moving casually from one thing to the next on a screen, giving us 'surfing the web', a sense that keeps the image of gliding smoothly across a moving surface.

How the word is built

• surf (the breaking waves near a shore)
• -ing (gerund/verb-noun suffix)