When do we double the consonant before '-ing' affix?

Question

My son is learning how to spell. He is doing a good job listening to sounds and working out spelling that way (which doesn't work for many words, but at least a lot of common ones), but although he's gotten the -ing chunk, he frequently misses doubling letters in these words.

Is there a guideline for when the end consonant is doubled? He's working on these sorts of words:

riding

sitting

skating

writing

getting

Does this answer your question? Why is there one P in "hoping" and two P's in "hopping"? — , May 24 '20 at 21:21
I rather think my seven year old question answers the one asked last month, rather than the other way around. — Kit Z. Fox, Jun 01 '20 at 21:39
We could close that question as a duplicate of this one, in which case we'd be giving preference to a less accurate accepted answer. Please don't take this the wrong way. These are, after all, just answers to questions, and we want them to be correct. We're not taking your child away from you. : ) I get how it feels, though. — , Jun 02 '20 at 02:31
I don't think we need to close the more recent one with more detailed answers. That one probably ought to have been closed as a dupe of this before it had lots of answers, but it doesn't really matter. This was one of the original founding questions for the site. It was intended to be canonical. — Kit Z. Fox, Jun 02 '20 at 18:07
Well, that didn't happen, and this isn't a canonical question/answer. The option is there; I say we just do the right thing. People can only gain from it... — , Jun 06 '20 at 17:41

score 12 · Accepted Answer · edited May 12 '21 at 01:01

Are they still teaching the old 'long/short' vowels? If so, here's the rule:

If the syllable before the /-ing/ is pronounced with a 'long' vowel, leave the final consonant single (and delete any final silent /e/)
If it's pronounced with a 'short' vowel, double the final consonant.

It may help make this clearer if you explain that a vowel before a doubled consonant is (almost) always short. Then write the /-ing/ forms out 'wrong' and invite your son to pronounce them the way they look:


ride	ridding
sit	siting
skate	skatting
write	writting
get	geting

As Renan points out, it gets more complicated when the final syllable of the base form is unstressed; but it looks like your son hasn't gotten that far yet.

score 8 · Answer 2 · answered Jan 24 '13 at 10:11

8

For verbs ending in 'el' such as travel, cancel, chisel, excel, fuel, funnel, grovel, label, marvel etc, remember that British English requires a double 'l' as in 'travelling', whereas American English does not.

answered Jan 24 '13 at 10:11

Walrus

743
5
5

score 6 · Answer 3 · answered Jan 24 '13 at 01:15

From here, you double the consonant when:

one-syllable words: if the word ends with a consonant-vowel-consonant pattern (sit -> sitting, get -> getting).
two-syllable words: if the stress is on the second syllable (begin -> beginning).

For your other words (ride -> riding, skate -> skating, write -> writing) the e is dropped and replaced by ing.

score 2 · Answer 4 · edited Oct 08 '16 at 10:20

We have verbs whose final letter -e is silent, e.g., to hope. When -ing or -ed is added the letter e is dropped to avoid clumsy spellings such as hopeing or hopeed.

If we wrote hop and hoping we would not see whether hoping is from the verb to hope, or to hop.

That is the reason for consonant doubling after short and stressed vowels (a e i o u) + one consonant.

Consonant doubling also occurs with long and stressed vowels as in to refer and referring and with unstressed vowels (only special endings) as in to travel / travelling (American spelling: traveling).

When do we double the consonant before '-ing' affix?

4 Answers4

Linked

Related