Tripping

How to spell tripping

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce tripping

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does tripping mean?

1. verbCatching the foot on something and starting to fall, or causing someone else to do so.
2. verbActivating a switch, sensor, or mechanism, often accidentally or automatically.

Tripping in a sentence

• The loose carpet edge kept tripping unwary visitors.

• The cat kept tripping the motion sensor in the hallway at night.

• She nearly fell, tripping over the cable left across the floor.

• A power surge was tripping the circuit breaker every evening.

Where does tripping come from?

Language of origin: French

The base verb 'trip' arrived in Middle English as 'trippen', borrowed in the 1300s from Old French 'triper' or 'treper', meaning 'to strike with the feet' or 'to dance'. That French verb was itself of Germanic origin, related to words about light, quick foot movement, and early on 'trip' carried the cheerful sense of dancing or stepping nimbly rather than falling over. Over time two strands developed: the graceful 'to move with light steps' and the accidental 'to catch the foot and stumble', the meaning most people reach for today. The drug-culture sense of an intense hallucinatory experience is a much later twentieth-century extension. The single-letter base ends in a short stressed vowel, which is exactly why the 'p' doubles before '-ing'; remembering the rule (short vowel plus single final consonant means double it) keeps writers from the common slip of writing 'triping'.

How the word is built

• trip (to stumble or step lightly)
• -p- (doubled consonant)
• -ing (present participle/gerund)