Traveling

How to spell traveling

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce traveling

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does traveling mean?

1. verbGoing from one place to another, especially over a distance, as an ongoing action.

Traveling in a sentence

• Traveling for work means she spends most weekends in airports.

• Traveling light made the long backpacking trip far easier.

Where does traveling come from?

Language of origin: French

This word goes back to the Old French travailler, meaning 'to toil' or 'to labour hard', which itself came from the Late Latin trepalium, the name of a brutal three-staked instrument of torture (from tres 'three' and palus 'stake'). Medieval journeys were so arduous and dangerous that the word for painful labour came to describe making a journey, and English borrowed the noun 'travail' in the 1300s before it softened into the everyday verb 'travel'. The grim original sense still survives in the modern English word 'travail', meaning hard or painful effort. The American spelling 'traveling' uses a single l: under the rule that a final l is only doubled when the stress lands on the last syllable, and since the stress in 'travel' falls on the first syllable, American convention leaves the consonant single. British and Canadian writers instead double it to 'travelling', which is exactly why this word is such a reliable transatlantic spelling trap.

How the word is built

• travel (from Old French travail: journey, toil)
• -ing (present participle / verbal noun suffix); American spelling keeps a single l because the stress falls on the first syllable

British and American spelling

Traveling is the American spelling. British English spells it travelling.