Weaving

How to spell weaving

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce weaving

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does weaving mean?

1. nounThe craft or process of interlacing threads or yarn to form cloth, usually on a loom.
2. verbMoving along by twisting and turning to avoid obstacles or other people.

Weaving in a sentence

• noun

  The museum exhibit explained traditional weaving on a wooden loom.

• verb

  The courier was weaving between the slow cars on his bike.

• noun

  She signed up for an evening class in weaving and dyeing.

• verb

  She kept weaving through the busy market without slowing down.

Where does weaving come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word descends from the Old English verb wefan, meaning 'to interlace threads into cloth', which sat among a family of related Germanic words including the Old Norse vefa and the Old High German weban. The deeper root traces back to a Proto-Indo-European source meaning 'to weave' or 'to spin', the same ancestral idea that gives us 'web', 'weft' and even 'wasp' (named for the woven look of its nest). The core sense has always been the over-and-under interlacing of strands on a loom, but by the 1500s the verb had stretched to describe any winding, threading movement, such as a person picking a path through a crowd. The spelling keeps the 'ea' vowel inherited from the Middle English weven, which is the small trap here, since the sound is a long 'ee'. The gerund form 'weaving' has named the craft itself since at least the medieval cloth trade, when it was a major English industry.

How the word is built

• weave (from Old English wefan: to interlace threads)
• -ing (present participle / gerund suffix)