Travelling

How to spell travelling

10 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce travelling

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does travelling mean?

1. verbMaking a journey or moving from one place to another.

Travelling in a sentence

• She spent the summer travelling across southern Europe by train.

• He hates travelling during rush hour because the roads are jammed.

Where does travelling come from?

Language of origin: French

The base word travel began life as the Old French travailler, meaning to toil, labour, or suffer, which itself came from the Late Latin trepalium, the name of a three-pronged instrument of torture (from tres 'three' and palus 'stake'). In Middle English the form travailen first meant to work hard or to torment oneself, and because long journeys in the medieval world were so arduous, the sense gradually narrowed to the effort of making a journey, and then simply to journeying itself. The harsher original survives in the modern word travail, meaning painful labour, which is really the same word wearing its older meaning. The doubled l in travelling reflects the British and Canadian rule of doubling a final l before a vowel suffix regardless of stress, whereas American spelling keeps a single l in traveling.

How the word is built

• travel (to journey)
• -ling (the -ing participle, with the final l doubled in British and Canadian spelling)

British and American spelling

Travelling is the British spelling. American English spells it traveling.