Warming

How to spell warming

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce warming

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does warming mean?

1. verbIn the process of becoming warmer or of making something warmer.
2. adjectiveProducing a pleasant feeling of warmth or comfort.

Warming in a sentence

• verb

  The soup is warming slowly on the back burner.

• adjective

  A warming bowl of stew is exactly what we need after the walk.

• verb

  The climate is warming faster than the early models predicted.

• adjective

  The cabin had a warming glow from the wood stove.

Where does warming come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word is built on the adjective and verb 'warm', which descends from the Old English wearm, meaning exactly what it does today: having a moderate degree of heat. That word goes back to a Proto-Germanic root warmaz, and you can still see its close relatives in the German warm and the Dutch warm, all sharing the same ancient sense of pleasant heat. The '-ing' ending is the native English suffix that turns a verb into a present participle or a noun of action, so 'warming' simply names the process of becoming or making warm. Because the base word has always been spelled with a plain 'w' and 'arm', the only thing to watch in writing is the single 'm' before the regular '-ing', not a doubled one. In modern usage it has also picked up the large environmental sense in the phrase 'global warming', recorded from the middle of the twentieth century.

How the word is built

• warm (from Old English wearm: warm)
• -ing (present participle / gerund suffix)