Yelling

How to spell yelling

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce yelling

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does yelling mean?

1. verbCrying out or shouting in a loud, often angry or urgent voice.

Yelling in a sentence

• The coach kept yelling instructions from the sideline.

• She could hear the neighbours yelling at each other through the wall.

Where does yelling come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word grows from the verb 'yell', which descends from the Old English 'giellan' (also written 'gellan'), meaning to cry out, shout, or even to sing in a harsh, ringing voice. That verb belongs to a wider Germanic family of words for loud noise, sharing roots with the same ancestry that gave us 'yelp' and the bird name 'nightingale', whose old sense was the singer of the night. Over the centuries the harsh, ringing connotation narrowed toward angry or urgent shouting, and the regular '-ing' ending was added to form the present participle and the noun for the act itself. The doubled 'l' is the only real spelling point: because the base 'yell' already ends in two l's, that pair simply carries straight through into 'yelling'. The word has stayed close to its Anglo-Saxon roots and never needed reshaping from Latin or French.

How the word is built

• yell (to cry out loudly)
• -ing (present participle / gerund suffix)