Thumping

How to spell thumping

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce thumping

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does thumping mean?

1. verbStriking, beating, or pounding with heavy, repeated blows or beats.
2. adjectiveImpressively large, heavy, or emphatic.

Thumping in a sentence

• verb

  Her heart was thumping hard after she ran up the stairs.

• adjective

  The party won the seat with a thumping majority.

• verb

  The washing machine kept thumping against the wall during the spin cycle.

• adjective

  She woke up with a thumping headache after the late night.

Where does thumping come from?

Language of origin: Other

This word grows from the verb 'thump', which first appears in English in the 1530s and is widely judged to be imitative in origin, coined to echo the dull, heavy sound of a forceful blow striking a solid surface. Words of this echoic type are common in the Germanic languages, where a cluster of similar-sounding terms (thud, thwack, bump) all suggest impact, so 'thump' fits naturally into that family even though no single parent word can be traced with certainty. Adding the ordinary '-ing' ending produced 'thumping', used first for the literal act of beating or pounding and then, by the 1570s, as a colourful intensifier meaning 'remarkably large', as in a thumping victory. The leap from a heavy blow to the idea of 'big' mirrors other English size words like 'whopping' and 'walloping', which also began as words for striking. The spelling stays helpfully phonetic: the 'th' sound, a single 'p', and a plain '-ing', with no silent letters to trip up the writer.

How the word is built

• thump (imitative root: to strike heavily)
• -ing (present participle / adjective suffix)