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The Modern English-ing ending, which is used to form both gerunds and present participles of verbs (i.e. in noun and adjective uses), derives from two different historical suffixes. The gerund (noun) use comes from Middle English-ing, which is from Old English-ing, -ung (suffixes forming nouns from verbs).
Normal rules for adding suffixes beginning with a vowel apply: If the base form ends in e then only d is added (like → liked); if the base form ends in a consonant followed by y then the y is changed to i before adding the ending (try → tried; an exception is the verb sky (a ball), which can form skied or skyed).
Some people extend this use of the apostrophe to other cases, such as plurals of numbers written in figures (e.g. "1990's"), words used as terms (e.g. "his writing uses a lot of but's"). However others prefer to avoid this method (which can lead to confusion with the possessive -'s ), and write 1990s , buts ; this is the style recommended by ...
An -ing form is termed gerund when it behaves as a verb within a clause (so that it may be modified by an adverb or have an object); but the resulting clause as a whole (sometimes consisting of only one word, the gerund itself) functions as a noun within the larger sentence.
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. (The regular ending -ed is also devoiced after voiceless consonants in regular verbs, as described under English verbs § Past tense, but this is not now ...
Similarly, in the poetry of Jonathan Swift (1667–1745), -ing forms consistently rhyme with words ending in /ɪn/, as in this verse of A Ballad on the Game of Traffic, where "lining" rhymes with "fine in": But Weston has a new-cast gown On Sundays to be fine in, And, if she can but win a crown, 'Twill just new dye the lining.
The most-notable of these is the -dous puzzle of finding words ending in -dous, which was popular in the 1880s. This took various forms, sometimes simply listing all words or all common words, [ 29 ] [ 30 ] sometimes being posed as a riddle, giving the three common words, tremendous , stupendous , and hazardous , and requesting the rarer fourth ...
For example, in certain words ending in consonants, -e-is added, e.g. mies – miehen "man – of the man", and in some, but not all words ending in -i, the -i is changed to an -e-, to give -en, e.g. lumi – lumen "snow – of the snow". The genitive is used extensively, with animate and inanimate possessors.