Surrounding

How to spell surrounding

11 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce surrounding

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does surrounding mean?

1. adjectiveLocated all around a particular place or thing; nearby on every side.
2. verbIn the act of encircling or being all around something.

Surrounding in a sentence

• adjective

  The surrounding hills were still covered in snow.

• verb

  Officers were surrounding the building before dawn.

• adjective

  They spent the afternoon exploring the surrounding countryside on foot.

• verb

  A low stone wall surrounding the garden kept the wind out.

Where does surrounding come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb superundare, meaning 'to overflow', built from super 'over, above' and undare 'to rise in waves', which itself comes from unda 'a wave'. It passed into Old French as soronder, still carrying the watery idea of flooding over the land around something. When English borrowed it in the 1400s, the sense drifted from 'flooding around' to simply 'encircling' or 'lying all about', helped along by the unrelated but similar-sounding English word 'round', which reshaped both its spelling and its meaning. That folk reshaping is why we now spell it with 'round' and think of it as 'going around', even though the original Latin had nothing to do with circles. The doubled r at the front survives from the Latin prefix super, and forgetting that second r is the most common slip when writing the word.

How the word is built

• sur- (over, from Latin super)
• round (circle, ring)
• -ing (participle/adjective suffix)