acrostic
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
Letters
8 characters
Language
English
word origin
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "acrostic", 8-letters, with pronunciation in International Phonetic Alphabet notation, etymology traced through Germanic and Romance roots where applicable, common misspelling variants catalogued from Wiktionary, and usage frequency ranked against an open word-frequency list covering the top 100,000 English words. PlainSpell covers English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and German spelling with confusable-pair detection that highlights visually and phonetically similar words. This entry for "acrostic" 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 "acrostic" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
acrostic is aEnglishnoun. It means: A poem or other text in which certain letters, often the first in each line, spell out a name or message. Pronounced /əˈkɹɒstɪk/.
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Browse all word comparisons →| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | acrostic |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /əˈkɹɒstɪk/ |
| Letters | 8 |
| Frequency rank | #83,947 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for acrostic is 8 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /əˈkɹɒstɪk/. Corpus data places it at rank #83,947 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 4 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
No misspelling variants are generated for acrostic in our index, suggesting the orthography follows predictable English patterns.It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, which tends to mean the word is visually distinctive enough to stand on its own.
Etymologically, the entry records: Borrowed from Middle French acrostiche, acrostique (“acrostic”) (modern French acrostiche), and its etymon Late Latin acrostichis, from Ancient Greek ἀκροστιχίς (akrostikhís), from ἄκρο- (ákro-, prefix indicating, among other things, the extremity or tip of… 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 acrostic, spelled A-C-R-O-S-T-I-C, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1A poem or other text in which certain letters, often the first in each line, spell out a name or message.
- 2A poem in Hebrew in which successive lines or verses start with consecutive letters of the alphabet.
- 3A kind of word puzzle, whose solution forms an anagram of a quotation, with its initial letters often forming the name of the person quoted.
- 4A kind of word puzzle in which a series of words are clued, and individual letters from the clued word spell out one or more additional words.
Etymology
Borrowed from Middle French acrostiche, acrostique (“acrostic”) (modern French acrostiche), and its etymon Late Latin acrostichis, from Ancient Greek ἀκροστιχίς (akrostikhís), from ἄκρο- (ákro-, prefix indicating, among other things, the extremity or tip of something) + στῐ́χος (stĭ́khos, “row or file of soldiers; line of poetry, verse”) (ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *steygʰ- (“to climb, go”)).
This word in other languages
Frequency rank: #83,947 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter A in our English index: