Word.ws English Dictionary

-in'

-in' is the pronunciation spelling of -ing.

Meaning of -ing

Suffix (1)

-ing

  1. As true nouns.
    • My hearing is not good.
  2. As gerunds.
    • Smoking marijuana cigarettes daily is bad for your health.
  3. Used to form nouns denoting materials or systems of objects which are used or employed in an action, or considered collectively.
    • Roofing is material that is used to roof.

Suffix (2)

-ing

  1. Used to form present participles of verbs.
    • Rolling stones gather no moss.

Suffix (3)

-ing

  1. (idiomatic) Forming derivative nouns (originally masculine), with the sense ‘son of, belonging to’, as in placenames, patronymics or diminutives; -ite.
    • Ealing, Dorking, Reading, Worthing
  2. Forming nouns having a specified quality, characteristic, or nature; of the kind of
    • sweet + -ing → sweeting

Forms of -in'

alternative form-in

Origin of -in'

G‐dropped pronunciation of -ing with /n/ instead of /ŋ/. It is inherited from Middle English -ynge, -inge, -yng, -ing, from two sources: * the Old English present participle suffix -ende; * the Old English verbal noun suffix -ung/-ing. The two Old English suffixes became confused in Middle English; although the exact mechanism of this confusion is disputed, -in' is probably derived from -ung/-ing with loss of /ɡ/ under low stress rather than from -ende.

Questions about -in'

What is -in' the pronunciation spelling of?
-in' is the pronunciation spelling of -ing.

Words near -in' in the dictionary

  1. -ime
  2. -imibe
  3. -imundo
  4. -imus
  5. -in
  6. -in'
  7. -in-law
  8. -in-waiting
  9. -ina
  10. -inator
  11. -inda

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: -in' (page history and authors); -ing (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “-in'.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/-in%27. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.