asteroid
/ˈæst(ə)ɹɔɪd/noun
asteroid is spelled A-S-T-E-R-O-I-D. The wrong spelling people search most is asteriod: about 150 Bing searches a month in the United States (September 2025 to August 2026), about 1 in 26 of all searches for the word. Asteroid is a noun meaning “A naturally occurring solid object, which is smaller than a planet and a dwarf planet, larger than a…”. The plural of asteroid is asteroids.
How many letters and syllables are in asteroid?
| Letters | 8: A-S-T-E-R-O-I-D |
|---|---|
| Syllables | 3 (from its American pronunciation) |
| In writing | 3.6 times per million words; the 13,695th most frequent word form |
| Wrong spellings searched | 1; the most searched, asteriod, about 150 Bing searches a month (all of them) |
| Sounds like |
Sources: letters and syllables from the English Wiktionary's hyphenation or pronunciation and the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary; written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media); 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).
How do you spell asteroid?
Asteroid is spelled A-S-T-E-R-O-I-D. One wrong spelling is searched or written often enough to measure; together they are about 1 in 26 of the searches for asteroid in either form.
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.
How common is asteroid?
Asteroid appears 3.6 times per million words in written English, the 13,695th 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 pronounce asteroid?
- /ˈæst(ə)ɹɔɪd/
Asteroid has 3 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-us-asteroid.ogg, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).
Words people confuse with asteroid
Sounds like: astroid (Wiktionary's homophone list; some hold only in some accents).
Sources: English Wiktionary (homophones, alternative spellings).
Forms of asteroid
- asteroids plural
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
What does asteroid mean?
The meanings the English Wiktionary records, quoted as written there (source below).
noun
- 1
A naturally occurring solid object, which is smaller than a planet and a dwarf planet, larger than a meteoroid and not a comet, that orbits a star and often has an irregular shape.
- 2
In the Solar System, such a body that orbits within the orbit of Jupiter.
- 3
Any member of the taxonomic class Asteroidea; a starfish.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
Asteroid in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese
In the sense astronomy: a naturally occurring solid object, which is smaller than a planet an:
| Language | Words |
|---|---|
| French | astéroïde |
| German | Asteroid |
| Portuguese | asteroide, planetoide |
| Spanish | asteroide, planetoide |
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 asteroid come from?
]Introduced by German–British astronomer William Herschel in 1802 upon the suggestion of classical scholar Charles Burney Jr. (1757–1817), the son of music historian Charles Burney, a friend of Herschel's. Probably coined as a learned borrowing from Ancient Greek ἀστεροειδής (asteroeidḗs, “starlike”), from ἀστήρ (astḗr, “celestial body”) + -ειδής (-eidḗs, adjective-forming suffix). By surface analysis, aster + -oid.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).