Worrying

How to spell worrying

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce worrying

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does worrying mean?

1. adjectiveCausing anxiety, unease, or concern.
2. verbPresent participle of worry: feeling troubled, or causing someone to feel troubled.

Worrying in a sentence

• adjective

  The sudden drop in sales was a worrying sign for the whole team.

• verb

  She spent the whole weekend worrying about the job interview.

• adjective

  There is a worrying trend of late payments from several clients.

• verb

  He kept worrying that the flight would be cancelled.

Where does worrying come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word grows from the verb 'worry', which descends from the Old English 'wyrgan', meaning literally 'to strangle' or 'to throttle'. That violent sense survived for centuries in the idea of a dog 'worrying' livestock by seizing and shaking it by the throat. Over time the meaning softened from physical attack to the figurative sense of harassing or pestering, and by the 1800s it had shifted again to the modern emotional sense of fretting or being troubled in the mind. The form 'worrying' is simply the present participle, made by adding '-ing' to the stem. Because the base verb already carries a double 'r', that doubling is preserved here, which is the small spelling point worth fixing in memory: it is 'worrying', not 'worying'.

How the word is built

• worry (to feel or cause anxiety)
• -ing (forming a participle or adjective)