Material made of threads or wires woven together with open spaces between them, often used to catch or hold things.
From Old English 'net' (a meshed fabric for catching fish) plus the suffix '-ing'. The root relates to Proto-Germanic 'natjan', and the suffix '-ing' originally indicated the material or process itself rather than just an action.
The word 'netting' shows how English reuses suffixes in clever ways—'-ing' doesn't always mean 'the act of doing something,' but here it describes the material itself, much like 'tubing' is the tube material, not the act of putting things in tubes.
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