Skip to main content
PlainSpell

anniversary

/ˌænɪˈvɝs(ə)ɹi/noun

anniversary is spelled A-N-N-I-V-E-R-S-A-R-Y. The wrong spelling people search most is aniversary: about 350 Bing searches a month in the United States (September 2025 to August 2026), about 1 in 53 of all searches for the word. Anniversary is a noun meaning “A day that is an exact number of years (to the day) since a given significant event occurred. Often preceded…”. The plural of anniversary is anniversaries.

How do you spell anniversary?

Anniversary is spelled A-N-N-I-V-E-R-S-A-R-Y. 2 wrong spellings are searched or written often enough to measure; together they are about 1 in 36 of the searches for anniversary in either form.

anniversarythe right spelling18,410 searches a month
aniversarya missing n350 searches a month
anniversaya missing r170 searches a month

Bing searches in the United States: the average month from September 2025 to August 2026 (Microsoft Advertising keyword data through DataForSEO, read September 30, 2026). Wrong spellings are taken from Wiktionary entries tagged "misspelling" and its obsolete or nonstandard forms, Wikipedia's Lists of common misspellings and the codespell dictionary, then measured. The proofreader's marks show the change that corrects each one.

What does anniversary mean?

noun

  1. 1

    A day that is an exact number of years (to the day) since a given significant event occurred. Often preceded by an ordinal number indicating the number of years.

    Today is the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war.

  2. 2

    Such a day that commemorates a wedding.

    We are celebrating our tenth anniversary today.

  3. 3

    A day subsequent in time to a given event by some significant period other than a year (especially as prefixed by the amount of time in question).

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How do you pronounce anniversary?

  • UK /ˌænɪˈvɜːs(ə)ɹi/
  • British /ˌanɪˈvəːs(ə)ɹi/
  • US /ˌænɪˈvɝs(ə)ɹi/

Anniversary has 5 syllables (counted from its American pronunciation in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary).

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: En-uk-anniversary.ogg, En-us-anniversary.ogg, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).

Forms of anniversary

  • anniversaries plural

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How common is anniversary?

Anniversary appears 34 times per million words in written English, the 2,831st most frequent word form in the list.

Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).

How do you abbreviate anniversary?

Wiktionary records 2 abbreviations of anniversary: Ann, anniv.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

Anniversary in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese

LanguageWords
Frenchanniversaire (day an exact number of years since an event), anniversaire de mariage (wedding anniversary)
GermanJahrestag, Jubiläum (day an exact number of years since an event), Hochzeitstag (wedding anniversary)
Portugueseaniversário (day an exact number of years since an event), aniversário de casamento, bodas (wedding anniversary)
Spanishaniversario (day an exact number of years since an event)

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Translations are Wiktionary's, by sense; a linked word has its own PlainSpell page.

Where does anniversary come from?

From Middle English anniversary, from Medieval Latin anniversāria (diēs), anniversārium, from anniversārius (“yearly”), from annus (“year”) + versus, past participle of vertere (“to turn”).

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).