Whiting

How to spell whiting

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce whiting

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does whiting mean?

1. nounA small, slender sea fish with pale flesh, related to the cod and eaten as food.

Whiting in a sentence

• The fishmonger sold fresh whiting alongside the cod and haddock.

• She dusted the fillet of whiting in flour before frying it.

Where does whiting come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word grows straight out of the everyday adjective 'white', the Old English 'hwit', meaning the palest colour. The fish sense, recorded in English from the 1400s, was named for the pale, almost translucent flesh of the small sea fish; the form was reinforced by the Middle Dutch 'wijting', built on the very same Germanic colour word, since Dutch and Flemish fishermen traded heavily across the North Sea. The pigment sense follows the same logic: finely ground chalk used to whiten walls, putty and metal was simply 'whiting', the white stuff. The spelling trap is the silent 'wh' opening and the single 't', because writers often expect a doubled consonant after a short vowel. Remembering that it is plainly 'white' plus '-ing' keeps both the 'wh' and the single 't' in place.

How the word is built

• white (root: pale colour)
• -ing (noun suffix)