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-ing is a suffix used to make one of the inflected forms of English verbs. This verb form is used as a present participle, as a gerund, and sometimes as an independent noun or adjective. The suffix is also found in certain words like morning and ceiling, and in names such as Browning.
This affects words such as lamb and plumb, as well as derived forms with suffixes, such as lambs, lambing, plumbed, plumber. By analogy with words like these, certain other words ending in /m/, which had no historical /b/ sound, had a silent letter b added to their spelling by way of hypercorrection. Such words include limb and crumb. [35]
These include ending in -t (e.g. build, bend, send), stem changes (whether it is a vowel, such as in sit, win or hold, or a consonant, such as in teach and seek, that changes), or adding the [n] suffix to the past participle form (e.g. drive, show, rise). English irregular verbs are now a closed group, which means that newly formed verbs are ...
Like the -ing suffix, the to-infinitive spread historically from a narrow original use, a prepositional phrase referring to future time. Like the -ing form it spread to all English verbs and to form non-finite clauses. Like the -ing form, it spread by analogy to use with words of similar meaning.
When suffixes are added to words ending with a hard or soft g (such as -ed, -ing, -er, -est, -ism, -ist, -edness, -ish(ness), -ily, -iness, -ier, -iest, -ingly, -edly, and -ishly), the sound is normally maintained. Sometimes the normal rules of spelling changes before suffixes can help signal whether the hard or soft sound is intended.
In some weak verbs ending in a final -t or -d, this final consonant coalesced with the weak past ending to leave a single -t or -d in the past forms. Some verbs ending in l or n had their past ending irregularly devoiced to -t , and in a few verbs ending with a v or z sound ( leave , lose ), both that sound and the past ending were devoiced.
In Old English and Middle English, any ng sequence stood for two sounds: the velar nasal [] followed by the voiced velar stop [].The velar nasal did not have a phonemic status, being a mere allophone of /n/, as in Spanish or Italian (or as in Modern Standard English in words such as Bengali or Vancouver, where there is a free variation between an alveolar nasal and a velar nasal).
This is a list of English words inherited and derived directly from the Old English stage of the language. This list also includes neologisms formed from Old English roots and/or particles in later forms of English, and words borrowed into other languages (e.g. French, Anglo-French, etc.) then borrowed back into English (e.g. bateau, chiffon, gourmet, nordic, etc.).