cage
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
Letters
4 characters
Language
English
word origin
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "cage", 4-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 "cage" 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 "cage" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
cage is aEnglishnoun. It means: An enclosure made of bars, normally to hold animals. Pronounced /keɪd͡ʒ/. It ranks #5,766 in English word frequency. Often confused with CE and CG.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | cage |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /keɪd͡ʒ/ |
| Letters | 4 |
| Frequency rank | #5,766 |
| Misspellings tracked | 5 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for cage is 4 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /keɪd͡ʒ/. Corpus data places it at rank #5,766 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 14 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 5 documented wrong-spelling variants for cage, with forms such as "acge", "caeg", and "cagge". 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, "CE", "CG", "can", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English cage, from Old French cage, from Latin cavea. Doublet of cadge and cavea and related to jail. 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 cage, spelled C-A-G-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1An enclosure made of bars, normally to hold animals.
- 2The passenger compartment of a lift.
- 3The goal.
- 4An automobile.
- 5Something that hinders freedom.
- 6A prison or prison cell.
- 7The area from which competitors throw a discus or hammer.
- 8An outer framework of timber, enclosing something within it.
- 9A skeleton frame to limit the motion of a loose piece, such as a ball valve.
- 10A wirework strainer, used in connection with pumps and pipes.
- 11The drum on which the rope is wound in a hoisting whim.
- 12The protective wire mask at the front of a helmet.
- 13A regular graph that has as few vertices as possible for its girth.
- 14In killer sudoku puzzles, an irregularly-shaped group of cells that must contain a set of unique digits adding up to a certain total, in addition to the usual constraints of sudoku.
Etymology
From Middle English cage, from Old French cage, from Latin cavea. Doublet of cadge and cavea and related to jail.
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: acge,caeg,cagge,ccage,cgae
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for cage
Misspelling Variants of "cage"
Frequency rank: #5,766 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter C in our English index: