acre
/ˈeɪ.kə/
"acre" is a 4-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“acre” sits in 20 confusable pairs (corpus #7,877) as a noun. The look-alike neighbours are the real trap.
- #7,877
- frequency rank, English
- 3,931
- “A” headwords
- 2
- tracked misspellings
- 20
- confusable pairs
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - An English unit of land area (symbol: a. or ac.) originally denoting a day's ploughing for a yoke of oxen, now standardized as 4,840 square yards or 4,046.86 square metres.
Corpus desk
Index EN-acre · acre · English
acre · rank #7,877 · 2 variants · 20 confusables
- FREQ-COMMON #7,877
- LEN-MID 4 letters
- VOW-2 2 vowels
- CONFUS-HIGH 20 pairs
- VAR-LOW 2 variants
- BOOK-MID 3,931
- PHOTO-FINISH zombie
Nearest frequency peer: zombie (-1 rank slots)
Read with this headword: Spelling guide for this pattern
Desk codes from Wiktionary headword shape, FrequencyWords rank tier, confusable-pair count, generated misspelling depth, letter-cohort book size, and photo-finish peer. Not a difficulty grade.
Frequency neighbours of confusable “acre”
Peers at similar corpus weight, separate from look-alike pairs below
- wishing
wishing
92,127 corpus weight
- workforce
workforce
92,126 corpus weight
- zombie
zombie
92,125 corpus weight
- acre
acre
92,124 corpus weight
- airports
airports
92,123 corpus weight
- alot
alot
92,122 corpus weight
What this shows Bars place “acre” against nearest ranked English headwords, not a reprint of the confusable-pair desk.
Visual similarity to commonly confused words
How many letter changes separate each confused pair (Levenshtein distance, normalized).
Source: PlainSpell confusable corpus (Wiktionary, CC BY-SA).
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | acre |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /ˈeɪ.kə/ |
| Letters | 4 |
| Frequency rank | #7,877 |
| Misspellings tracked | 2 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Corpus rank beside confusables of “acre”
Easy to mix with look-alikes
The spelling risk for acre is neighbouring look-alikes ("AR", "AE", …), not just typos; it is anoun pronounced /ˈeɪ.kə/. Frequency #7,877 among 3,931 “A” headwords. 8 recorded senses keep meaning in play.
Our generated misspelling index lists 2 likely wrong-spelling variants for acre, including "accre" and "acrre". Each of these forms differs from the correct spelling by one small edit: a doubled letter, a dropped silent letter, or a substituted vowel. It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "AR", "AE", "are", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *h₂eǵ-? Proto-Indo-European *h₂éǵros Proto-Germanic *akraz Proto-West Germanic *akr Old English æcer Middle English aker English acre From Middle English acre, aker, from Old English æcer (“field where crops are grown”), f… The correct English form is acre, spelled A-C-R-E.
Definition
- 1An English unit of land area (symbol: a. or ac.) originally denoting a day's ploughing for a yoke of oxen, now standardized as 4,840 square yards or 4,046.86 square metres.
- 2An English unit of land area (symbol: a. or ac.) originally denoting a day's ploughing for a yoke of oxen, now standardized as 4,840 square yards or 4,046.86 square metres.
- 3Any of various similar units of area in other systems.
- 4A wide expanse.
- 5A large quantity.
- 6A field.
- 7The acre's breadth by the length, English units of length equal to the statute dimensions of the acre: 22 yd (≈20 m) by 220 yd (≈200 m).
- 8A duel fought between individual Scots and Englishmen in the borderlands.
Recorded use
Wiktionary examplesThese source excerpts show how acre appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
Buried within the Mediterranean littoral are some seventy to ninety million tons of slag from ancient smelting, about a third of it concentrated in Iberia. This ceaseless industrial fueling caused the deforestation of an estimated fifty to seventy million acres of woodlands.
I like my new house—there’s acres of space!
Etymology
Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *h₂eǵ-? Proto-Indo-European *h₂éǵros Proto-Germanic *akraz Proto-West Germanic *akr Old English æcer Middle English aker English acre From Middle English acre, aker, from Old English æcer (“field where crops are grown”), from Proto-West Germanic *akr, from Proto-Germanic *akraz (“field”), from Proto-Indo-European *h₂éǵros (“field”). Doublet of agriculture. Cognate with Scots acre, aker, acker (“acre, field, arable land”), North Frisian ecir (“field, a measure of land”), West Frisian eker (“field”), Dutch akker (“field”), German Acker (“field, acre”), Norwegian åker (“field”) and Swedish åker (“field”), Icelandic akur (“field”), Latin ager (“land, field, acre, countryside”), Ancient Greek ἀγρός (agrós, “field”), Sanskrit अज्र (ájra, “field, plain”).
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as:
- accre
- acrre
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
How far each generated variant is from the correct spelling of acre - counted as single-character edits (an insertion, a deletion, or a substituted letter). The larger the bar, the easier the typo is to spot; one-edit slips are the ones that sneak past readers.
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA); frequency ordering uses the FrequencyWords open word-frequency list (2018 English corpus, MIT). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Similar English words by spelling shape
Same letter count and similar misspelling depth for "acre", not the corpus desk frequency band.
Same letter count
Frequency-ranked English headwords with 4 letters (nearest by frequency rank).