arm
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
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3 characters
Language
English
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "arm", 3-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 "arm" 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 "arm" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
arm is aEnglishnoun. It means: The portion of the upper human appendage, from the shoulder to the wrist and sometimes including the hand. Pronounced /ɑːm/. It ranks #1,887 in English word frequency. Often confused with as and at.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | arm |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /ɑːm/ |
| Letters | 3 |
| Frequency rank | #1,887 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for arm is 3 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ɑːm/. Corpus data places it at rank #1,887 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 11 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
No frequent misspelling variants are recorded for arm in our index, suggesting the orthography either follows predictable English patterns or the word is uncommon enough that typo corpora lack signal.It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "as", "at", "aw", 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 *h₂er- Proto-Indo-European *h₂érmos Proto-Germanic *armaz Proto-West Germanic *arm Old English earm Middle English arm English arm From Middle English arm, from Old English earm (Anglian arm), from Proto-West Germanic *arm… 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 arm, spelled A-R-M, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1The portion of the upper human appendage, from the shoulder to the wrist and sometimes including the hand.
- 2The extended portion of the upper limb, from the shoulder to the elbow.
- 3A limb, or locomotive or prehensile organ, of an invertebrate animal.
- 4The part of a piece of clothing that covers the arm.
- 5A long, narrow, more or less rigid part of an object extending from the main part or centre of the object, such as the armrest of an armchair, a crane, a pair of spectacles or a pair of compasses.
- 6A bay or inlet off a main body of water.
- 7A branch of an organization.
- 8Power; might; strength; support.
- 9A pitcher
- 10One of the two parts of a chromosome.
- 11A group of patients in a medical trial.
Etymology
Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *h₂er- Proto-Indo-European *h₂érmos Proto-Germanic *armaz Proto-West Germanic *arm Old English earm Middle English arm English arm From Middle English arm, from Old English earm (Anglian arm), from Proto-West Germanic *arm, from Proto-Germanic *armaz (“arm”), from Proto-Indo-European *h₂(e)rmos (“a fitting, joint; arm, forequarter”), a suffixed form of *h₂er- (“to join, fit together”). Cognates Akin to Dutch arm, German Arm, Yiddish אָרעם (orem), Danish, Norwegian and Swedish arm. Indo-European cognates include Latin armus (“the uppermost part of the arm, shoulder”), Bulgarian рамо (ramo), Polish ramię, Serbo-Croatian rȁme, Armenian արմունկ (armunk, “elbow”), Ancient Greek ἁρμός (harmós, “joint, shoulder”) and ἅρμα (hárma, “wagon, chariot”), Avestan 𐬀𐬭𐬨𐬀 (arma), Old Persian [script needed] (arma).
Synonyms
This word in other languages
Frequency rank: #1,887 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter A in our English index: