Visiting

How to spell visiting

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce visiting

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does visiting mean?

1. verbGoing to see and spending time with a person or place, as the ongoing action of a visit.
2. adjectiveDescribing a person or thing that is on a visit or used for visits, rather than permanently based there.

Visiting in a sentence

• verb

  She is visiting her parents in Scotland this weekend.

• adjective

  The visiting professor will lecture here for one term only.

• verb

  While visiting the museum, they joined a guided tour.

• adjective

  The hospital posts its visiting hours on the ward door.

Where does visiting come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word descends from the Latin verb visitare, meaning 'to go to see' or 'to inspect', which was a frequentative form of visere ('to look at closely'), itself built on videre, 'to see'. The sense of repeatedly going to see someone gave the word its lasting flavour of calling on a person or place. English took it through Old French visiter in the 1200s, at first with strong religious overtones of God 'visiting' or afflicting people, before settling into the ordinary social meaning of calling on friends and family. The form 'visiting' is simply the participle, and its spelling trap is the single 's' and single 't': because the stress falls on the first syllable, writers are sometimes tempted to double a consonant that is not in fact doubled. The same videre root survives in everyday relatives such as 'vision', 'video' and 'evident'.

How the word is built

• vis- (from Latin videre: to see)
• -it (frequentative stem)
• -ing (present participle/adjective suffix)