Undoing

How to spell undoing

7 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce undoing

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does undoing mean?

1. nounThe cause of someone's ruin, failure, or downfall.
2. nounThe action of unfastening, reversing, or cancelling something previously done.

Undoing in a sentence

• His careless spending proved to be his undoing.

• The undoing of the merger took months of legal work.

• Overconfidence on the final exam was her undoing.

• She spent the afternoon undoing the knots in the tangled cables.

Where does undoing come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word is built entirely from native English parts, which is part of why it feels so familiar yet trips people up. The verb 'do' descends from Old English 'don', meaning 'to perform, make, or put', and the prefix 'un-' is the ancient Germanic reversive that signals the opposite of an action. Combining them gave 'undon', literally 'to do the reverse of', recorded in Old English for unfastening or annulling something. By the late Middle Ages the noun 'undoing' had developed from the verb, picking up the figurative sense of a person's ruin or downfall, the thing that reverses all their success. The spelling trap is the meeting of 'do' and '-ing': the silent-looking 'o' stays put, so it is undo plus ing, never 'undooing' or 'undoeing'.

How the word is built

• un- (reverse, undo)
• do (perform, fasten)
• -ing (noun/gerund suffix)