anger
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
Letters
5 characters
Language
English
word origin
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "anger", 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 "anger" 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 "anger" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
anger is aEnglishnoun. It means: A strong and unpleasant feeling of displeasure, hostility, or antagonism, usually combined with an urge to yell, curse, damage or destroy things, or harm living beings, often stemming from perceive... Pronounced /ˈæ̞ŋɡə/. It ranks #3,466 in English word frequency. Often confused with Anne and ante.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | anger |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /ˈæ̞ŋɡə/ |
| Letters | 5 |
| Frequency rank | #3,466 |
| Misspellings tracked | 7 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for anger is 5 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈæ̞ŋɡə/. Corpus data places it at rank #3,466 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 2 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 anger, with forms such as "agner", "anegr", and "angerr". 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, "Anne", "ante", "Ayer", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English anger (“grief, pain, trouble, affliction, vexation, sorrow, wrath”), from Old Norse angr, ǫngr (“affliction, sorrow”) (compare Old Norse ang, ǫng (“troubled”)), from Proto-Germanic *angazaz (“grief, sorrow”), from Proto-Indo-European *h₂… 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 anger, spelled A-N-G-E-R, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1A strong and unpleasant feeling of displeasure, hostility, or antagonism, usually combined with an urge to yell, curse, damage or destroy things, or harm living beings, often stemming from perceived provocation, hurt, threat, insults, unfair or unjust treatment, or an undesired situation.
- 2Pain or stinging.
Etymology
From Middle English anger (“grief, pain, trouble, affliction, vexation, sorrow, wrath”), from Old Norse angr, ǫngr (“affliction, sorrow”) (compare Old Norse ang, ǫng (“troubled”)), from Proto-Germanic *angazaz (“grief, sorrow”), from Proto-Indo-European *h₂enǵʰ- (“narrow, tied together”). Cognate with Danish anger (“regret, remorse”), Norwegian Bokmål anger (“regret, remorse”), Swedish ånger (“regret”), Icelandic angur (“trouble”), Old English ange, enge (“narrow, close, straitened, constrained, confined, vexed, troubled, sorrowful, anxious, oppressive, severe, painful, cruel”), German Angst (“anxiety, anguish, fear”), Latin angō (“squeeze, choke, vex”), angor (“strangulation; anguish, torment”) (whence the English doublet angor), Albanian ang (“fear, anxiety, pain, nightmare”), Avestan 𐬄𐬰𐬀𐬵 (ązah, “strangulation; distress”), Ancient Greek ἄγχω (ánkhō, “I squeeze, strangle”), Sanskrit अंहस् (aṃhas), अंहु (aṃhu, “anxiety, distress, affliction”, literally “narrowness”). Also compare with English anguish, anxious, quinsy, and perhaps to awe and ugly. The word seems to have originally meant “to choke, squeeze”. The verb is from Middle English angren, angeren, from Old Norse angra. Compare with Icelandic angra, Norwegian Nynorsk angra, Norwegian Bokmål angre, Swedish ångra, Danish angre.
Synonyms
Antonyms
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: agner,anegr,angerr,angger,angre,annger,nager
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for anger
Misspelling Variants of "anger"
Frequency rank: #3,466 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter A in our English index: