acre
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
Letters
4 characters
Language
English
word origin
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "acre", 4-letters, with pronunciation in International Phonetic Alphabet notation, etymology traced through Germanic and Romance roots where applicable, common misspelling variants catalogued from Hunspell error dictionaries, and usage frequency ranked against the top 100,000 English words in the Wordfreq corpus. PlainSpell covers English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and German spelling with confusable-pair detection that highlights visually and phonetically similar words. This entry for "acre" includes synonyms, antonyms, homophones, and cross-language translation pointers sourced from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org extract. Whether you are verifying the correct spelling of "acre" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
acre is aEnglishnoun. It means: 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. Pronounced /ˈeɪ.kə/. It ranks #7,877 in English word frequency. Often confused with AR and AE.
| 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) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for acre is 4 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈeɪ.kə/. Corpus data places it at rank #7,877 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 8 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 2 documented wrong-spelling variants for acre, including "accre" and "acrre". Each variant represents a distinct typo pattern that appears often enough in corpora to be worth flagging, typically a doubled-consonant error, a silent-letter drop, or a vowel substitution.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… Root origin matters for spelling because borrowed morphemes (Greek, Latin, Old French, Old English) carry their source-language orthographic conventions into modern English, which is why historical etymology is often the cleanest predictor of whether a cluster like "-ough", "-eau", or "-tion" will appear. For readers arriving here from a spelling check, the authoritative guidance is: the correct English form is acre, spelled A-C-R-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
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.
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
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for acre
Misspelling Variants of "acre"
Frequency rank: #7,877 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter A in our English index: