Walking

How to spell walking

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce walking

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does walking mean?

1. nounThe activity of travelling on foot, especially for exercise or pleasure.
2. adjectiveRelating to or done on foot, as in being within easy reach by foot.
3. verbThe present participle of walk: currently moving along on foot.

Walking in a sentence

• noun

  Walking is a gentle form of exercise that suits almost any fitness level.

• adjective

  The apartment sits within walking distance of the train station.

• verb

  She was walking to work when the storm broke.

• noun

  She took up walking to clear her head after long days at the office.

• adjective

  They planned a leisurely walking tour of the old town.

• verb

  The children kept walking ahead of their parents along the beach.

Where does walking come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The base word walk comes from the Old English verb wealcan, which surprisingly did not originally mean to travel on foot at all; it meant to roll, to toss, or to move about restlessly. In the medieval cloth trade it even named the action of trampling and pounding wet wool to thicken it, a process called walking or fulling. Over the centuries the sense narrowed and settled on the familiar idea of moving along on one's feet at an ordinary pace, and the rolling, tossing connotations faded away. The -ing ending is a native Germanic suffix that turns the verb into its present participle (the act now happening), into a gerund naming the activity itself, and into an adjective. Because the spelling joins a hard k sound to the suffix, writers occasionally hesitate over the silent l that the al cluster preserves, a relic of the older pronunciation.

How the word is built

• walk (from Old English wealcan: to roll, toss, journey)
• -ing (forms a participle, gerund, or adjective)