Ticking

How to spell ticking

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce ticking

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does ticking mean?

1. nounThe light, regular clicking sound made by a clock or similar mechanism.
2. nounA strong, tightly woven cotton fabric used to cover mattresses and pillows.

Ticking in a sentence

• The steady ticking of the kitchen clock kept her awake.

• The old mattress was wrapped in striped blue ticking.

• He could hear a faint ticking coming from inside the parcel.

• She chose a heavy cotton ticking for the new pillow covers.

Where does ticking come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The everyday sense, the steady clicking of a clock, traces back to the verb 'tick', which is echoic in origin: it simply imitates the small, sharp sound it names. This 'tick' appears in Middle English and has close relatives across the Germanic languages, all built to mimic a light tap or click. The fabric sense, however, takes a very different and older route: it descends from 'tick' meaning the case or cover of a mattress, which came into English through Middle Dutch and Middle Low German from Latin 'theca', itself borrowed from the Greek 'theke', meaning a case, box, or sheath. Over time both 'tick' words gained the ordinary '-ing' ending, one to describe an ongoing sound and the other to name the stout woven cloth used for those covers. Because the spelling follows the regular rule of doubling the consonant before '-ing', the 'ck' here stays put and simply takes the suffix, which keeps the word reassuringly easy to write.

How the word is built

• tick (verb/noun)
• -ing (present participle / gerund / noun suffix)