Welding

How to spell welding

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce welding

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does welding mean?

1. nounThe process or activity of joining pieces of metal by heating them until they fuse together.
2. verbPresent participle of weld: actively joining metal by heat or pressure.

Welding in a sentence

• noun

  The apprentice spent two years learning welding before working on cars.

• verb

  He was welding the gate hinges back into place all afternoon.

• noun

  Thick gloves and a dark visor are essential for safe welding.

• verb

  The crew kept welding through the night to finish the pipeline.

Where does welding come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word grows out of the verb 'weld', which appeared in English around the end of the 1500s as an alteration of the older verb 'well', meaning to boil up, bubble, or rise to the surface. That earlier 'well' came from the Old English weallan, meaning to boil or seethe, the same image that survives in a 'well' of water that springs from the ground. Metalworkers borrowed the idea because heating iron until it almost boils lets two pieces fuse into one, and the spelling gained its 'd' apparently from the past participle form 'welled'. By the early 1600s 'weld' had settled into its modern industrial meaning of joining metal by heat or pressure, and 'welding' is simply that verb with the -ing ending acting as a noun or a continuous-tense form. The quiet spelling trap is the silent connection to 'well': the modern word looks unrelated to its watery, boiling ancestor.

How the word is built

• weld (to join metal by heat)
• -ing (gerund/verbal noun suffix)