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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.
The present participle is one of the uses of the -ing form of a verb. This usage is adjectival or adverbial. The main uses of this participle, or of participial phrases introduced by it, are as follows. (Uses of gerunds and verbal nouns, which take the same -ing form, appear in sections below.)
Derivational affixes, such as un-, -ation, anti-, pre-etc., introduce a semantic change to the word they are attached to. Inflectional affixes introduce a syntactic change, such as singular into plural (e.g. -(e)s), or present simple tense into present continuous or past tense by adding -ing, -ed to an English word.
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.
For example, in English the root catch and the suffix -ing are both morphemes; catch may appear as its own word, or it may be combined with -ing to form the new word catching. Morphology also analyzes how words behave as parts of speech, and how they may be inflected to express grammatical categories including number, tense, and aspect.
Some lists of common words distinguish between word forms, while others rank all forms of a word as a single lexeme (the form of the word as it would appear in a dictionary). For example, the lexeme be (as in to be ) comprises all its conjugations ( is , was , am , are , were , etc.), and contractions of those conjugations. [ 5 ]
In English, most words are uninflected, while the inflected endings that exist are mostly ambiguous: -ed may mark a verbal past tense, a participle or a fully adjectival form; -s may mark a plural noun, a possessive noun, or a present-tense verb form; -ing may mark a participle, gerund, or pure adjective or noun.
Because many words can be extended with prefixes (such as "un-" or "anti-" or "re-") or suffixes (such as "-ly" or "-ing" or "-ness"), a comprehensive list of words prone to misspelling would contain thousands of variations from combining prefixes or suffixes (or both) added to the root words.