Sweating

How to spell sweating

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce sweating

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does sweating mean?

1. verbProducing perspiration through the skin, usually from heat, exertion, or illness.
2. verbWorrying anxiously or feeling stressed about something, used informally.

Sweating in a sentence

• After the long run he was sweating heavily in the summer heat.

• She was sweating over the exam results all weekend.

• The patient kept sweating through the night with a high fever.

• There is no point sweating about a decision that is already made.

Where does sweating come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word grows from the Old English verb swaetan, meaning 'to perspire', which was built on the noun swat, the body's salty perspiration. Both go back to a Proto-Germanic root shared with Dutch zweten and German schwitzen, and even further back to a Proto-Indo-European root that also gave Latin sudor and the medical term 'sudorific'. The spelling trap lives in the vowels: although the word sounds like it begins with the 'sweat' that rhymes with 'wet', the historical long vowel left us the 'ea' digraph, so it is spelled with 'ea' but pronounced with a short 'e'. The -ing ending simply turns the verb into its present participle or a gerund, and because the base 'sweat' ends in a single vowel plus single consonant after a long-vowel history, the 't' is not doubled. Over the centuries the word also picked up a figurative sense of toiling hard or fretting anxiously, as in 'sweating over a deadline'.

How the word is built

• sweat (perspiration, from Old English swat)
• -ing (present participle / gerund suffix)