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PlainSpell

soul

UK /səʊl/noun, adjective, verb

soul is spelled S-O-U-L. The wrong spelling people search most is sould: about 120 Bing searches a month in the United States (September 2025 to August 2026), about 1 in 71 of all searches for the word. Soul is a noun meaning “The spirit or essence of a person usually thought to consist of one's thoughts and personality, often…”. The plural of soul is souls.

How do you spell soul?

Soul is spelled S-O-U-L. One wrong spelling is searched or written often enough to measure; together they are about 1 in 71 of the searches for soul in either form.

soulthe right spelling8,380 searches a month
souldan extra d120 searches a month

Bing searches in the United States: the average month from September 2025 to August 2026 (Microsoft Advertising keyword data through DataForSEO, read September 30, 2026). Wrong spellings are taken from Wiktionary entries tagged "misspelling" and its obsolete or nonstandard forms, Wikipedia's Lists of common misspellings and the codespell dictionary, then measured. The proofreader's marks show the change that corrects each one.

What does soul mean?

noun

  1. 1

    The spirit or essence of a person usually thought to consist of one's thoughts and personality, often believed to live on after the person's death.

  2. 2

    The spirit or essence of anything.

  3. 3

    Life, energy, vigor.

  4. 4

    Cultural consciousness and pride among people of African American heritage.

  5. 5

    A strong positive feeling of intense sensitivity and emotional fervor conveyed especially by African American performers.

  6. 6

    Soul music.

  7. 7

    A person, especially as one among many.

    18 January 1915, D. H. Lawrence, letter to William Hopkin I want to gather together about twenty souls and sail away from this world of war and squalor and found a little colony where there shall be no money but a sort of communism as far a

  8. 8

    An individual life.

    Fifty souls were lost when the ship sank.

adjective

  1. 1

    Characteristic of or pertaining to African American culture.

    soul music

verb

  1. 1

    obsoleteTo endow with a soul or mind.

  2. 2

    To beg on All Soul's Day.

  3. 3

    obsoleteTo feed or nourish.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How do you pronounce soul?

  • UK /səʊl/
  • UK [sɔʊɫ]
  • UK [sɒʊɫ]

Soul has one syllable (counted from its American pronunciation in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary).

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: En-us-soul.ogg, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).

Forms of soul

  • souls plural, present, singular, he/she/it
  • souling participle, present
  • souled participle, past

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How common is soul?

Soul appears 65 times per million words in written English, the 1,636th most frequent word form in the list.

Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).

Words people confuse with soul

Word pairs people search, with the monthly searches for “a vs b” (G: Google, B: Bing, United States).

sole vs soul880 G
sol vs soul0 B

Sounds like: sole (Wiktionary's homophone list; some hold only in some accents).

Sources: Google and Bing searches (September 2025 to August 2026, through DataForSEO); English Wiktionary (homophones, alternative spellings).

Soul in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese

LanguageWords
Frenchâme (the spirit or essence of a person that is often…), soul (soul music)
GermanSeele (the spirit or essence of a person that is often…), Soul (soul music), Geist (life, energy, vigour)
Portuguesealma (the spirit or essence of a person that is often…), soul (soul music), ânimo (life, energy, vigour)
Spanishalma, pneuma (the spirit or essence of a person that is often…)

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Translations are Wiktionary's, by sense; a linked word has its own PlainSpell page.

Where does soul come from?

From Middle English soule, sowle, saule, sawle, from Old English sāwol (“soul, life, spirit, being”), from Proto-West Germanic *saiwalu, from Proto-Germanic *saiwalō (“soul”), of an uncertain ultimate origin (see there for further information).

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).