Wrongdoing

How to spell wrongdoing

10 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce wrongdoing

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does wrongdoing mean?

1. nounIllegal or dishonest behaviour; an act that breaks moral or legal rules.

Wrongdoing in a sentence

• The audit found no evidence of financial wrongdoing at the firm.

• The manager denied any wrongdoing when the missing funds were raised.

Where does wrongdoing come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a transparent compound formed entirely from native English material: the adjective 'wrong' joined to the noun 'doing', the act of doing something. The first element traces back to the Old Norse 'rangr', meaning 'crooked', 'awry', or 'unjust', which entered English during the Scandinavian settlement and gradually shifted from the literal sense of bent or twisted to the moral sense of unjust or improper. The second element comes from the Old English verb 'don', meaning 'to do' or 'to perform', the same root that gives us the everyday verb 'do'. The two were welded into a single noun by the late Middle Ages to name an immoral or illegal act, a sense it has kept ever since. Because both halves are familiar words in their own right, the only real spelling trap is remembering the silent 'w' at the front, a relic of older English spelling, and keeping the two halves joined as one word.

How the word is built

• wrong (immoral, unjust)
• doing (from do: to act, perform)