basis
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 "basis", 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 "basis" 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 "basis" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
basis is aEnglishnoun. It means: A physical base or foundation. Pronounced /ˈbeɪ.sɪs/. It ranks #1,626 in English word frequency. Often confused with bis and boss.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | basis |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /ˈbeɪ.sɪs/ |
| Letters | 5 |
| Frequency rank | #1,626 |
| Misspellings tracked | 7 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for basis is 5 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈbeɪ.sɪs/. Corpus data places it at rank #1,626 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 8 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 basis, with forms such as "absis", "baiss", and "basiss". 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, "bis", "boss", "bass", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Latin basis, from Ancient Greek βάσις (básis), from Proto-Indo-European *gʷémtis, derived from Proto-Indo-European *gʷem- (whence also come). Doublet of base. 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 basis, spelled B-A-S-I-S, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1A physical base or foundation.
- 2A starting point, base or foundation for an argument or hypothesis.
- 3An underlying condition or circumstance.
- 4A regular frequency.
- 5The difference between the cash price a dealer pays to a farmer for his produce and an agreed reference price, which is usually the futures price at which the given crop is trading at a commodity exchange.
- 6In a vector space, a linearly independent set of vectors spanning the whole vector space.
- 7Amount paid for an investment, including commissions and other expenses.
- 8A collection of subsets ("basis elements") of a set, such that this collection covers the set, and for any two basis elements which both contain an element of the set, there is a third basis element contained in the intersection of the first two, which also contains that element.
Etymology
From Latin basis, from Ancient Greek βάσις (básis), from Proto-Indo-European *gʷémtis, derived from Proto-Indo-European *gʷem- (whence also come). Doublet of base.
Synonyms
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: absis,baiss,basiss,bassi,bassis,bbasis,bsais
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for basis
Misspelling Variants of "basis"
Frequency rank: #1,626 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter B in our English index: