Wiring

How to spell wiring

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce wiring

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does wiring mean?

1. nounThe system or arrangement of wires that carries electrical current or signals in a building or device.
2. nounThe action or process of installing wires to connect electrical components.

Wiring in a sentence

• The electrician warned that the old wiring in the attic was a fire hazard.

• The wiring of the new extension took the team most of the afternoon.

• Faulty wiring caused the lights to flicker every evening.

• Careful wiring of the circuit prevented any short during the test.

Where does wiring come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the gerund-noun built from the verb and noun 'wire', which traces directly back to the Old English 'wir', meaning a thin, drawn-out thread of metal. That word belongs to a broad Germanic family and is ultimately linked to a much older root meaning 'to bend' or 'to plait', the same idea that survives in the Latin 'viere', meaning 'to weave or twist together'. For centuries 'wire' referred simply to the slender metal filament itself, and only with the spread of the telegraph and then domestic electricity in the nineteenth century did 'wiring' come to mean the whole network of conductors carrying a signal or current. The spelling trap lives in the suffix: because English drops the final silent 'e' of 'wire' before adding '-ing', writers who keep the 'e' wrongly produce 'wireing'. Remembering that the same rule turns 'hire' into 'hiring' and 'fire' into 'firing' helps fix the correct single-i spelling.

How the word is built

• wire (metal thread)
• -ing (forming a noun of system or activity); the silent e of 'wire' is dropped before the suffix