amber
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
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5 characters
Language
English
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "amber", 5-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 "amber" 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 "amber" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
amber is aEnglishnoun. It means: Ambergris, the waxy product of the sperm whale. Pronounced /ˈam.bə/. It ranks #7,414 in English word frequency. Often confused with AmE and AMR.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | amber |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /ˈam.bə/ |
| Letters | 5 |
| Frequency rank | #7,414 |
| Misspellings tracked | 7 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for amber is 5 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈam.bə/. Corpus data places it at rank #7,414 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 7 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 7 documented wrong-spelling variants for amber, with forms such as "abmer", "ambber", and "amberr". 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, "AmE", "AMR", "amen", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English ambre, aumbre, from Old French aumbre, ambre, from Arabic عَنْبَر (ʕanbar, “ambergris”), from Middle Persian 𐭠𐭭𐭡𐭫 (ʾnbl /ambar/, “ambergris”). Compare English lamber, ambergris. Displaced Middle English smulting (from Old English s… 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 amber, spelled A-M-B-E-R, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1Ambergris, the waxy product of the sperm whale.
- 2Ambergris, the waxy product of the sperm whale.
- 3A hard, generally yellow to brown translucent or transparent fossil resin from extinct coniferous trees of the pine genus, used for jewellery, decoration and later dissolved as a binder in varnishes. One variety, blue amber, appears blue rather than yellow under direct sunlight.
- 4A yellow-orange colour.
- 5The intermediate light in a set of three traffic lights, which when illuminated indicates that drivers should stop when safe to do so. See also yellow light.
- 6The stop codon (nucleotide triplet) "UAG", or a mutant which has this stop codon at a premature place in its DNA sequence.
- 7Hesitance to proceed, or limited approval to proceed; an amber light.
Etymology
From Middle English ambre, aumbre, from Old French aumbre, ambre, from Arabic عَنْبَر (ʕanbar, “ambergris”), from Middle Persian 𐭠𐭭𐭡𐭫 (ʾnbl /ambar/, “ambergris”). Compare English lamber, ambergris. Displaced Middle English smulting (from Old English smelting (“amber”)), Old English eolhsand (“amber”), Old English glær (“amber”), and Old English sāp (“amber, resin, pomade”). * The nucleotide sequence "UAG" is named "amber" for the first person to isolate the amber mutation, California Institute of Technology graduate student Harris Bernstein, whose last name ("Bernstein") is the German word for the resin "amber".
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: abmer,ambber,amberr,ambre,amebr,ammber,maber
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for amber
Misspelling Variants of "amber"
Frequency rank: #7,414 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter A in our English index: