capital
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
Letters
7 characters
Language
English
word origin
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "capital", 7-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 "capital" 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 "capital" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
capital is aEnglishnoun. It means: Money and wealth: the means to acquire goods and services, especially in a non-barter system. Pronounced /ˈkæpɪtəl/. It ranks #1,044 in English word frequency. Often confused with capitol and capitan.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | capital |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /ˈkæpɪtəl/ |
| Letters | 7 |
| Frequency rank | #1,044 |
| Misspellings tracked | 10 |
| Confusable pairs | 3 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for capital is 7 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈkæpɪtəl/. Corpus data places it at rank #1,044 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 10 documented wrong-spelling variants for capital, with forms such as "acpital", "caiptal", and "capiatl". 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 3 confusable-pair relationships, "capitol", "capitan", "capita", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English capital, borrowed partly from Old French capital and partly from Latin capitālis (“of the head”) (in sense “head of cattle”), from caput (“head”) (English cap) + -ālis (suffix forming adjectives). Use in trade and finance originated in M… 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 capital, spelled C-A-P-I-T-A-L, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1Money and wealth: the means to acquire goods and services, especially in a non-barter system.
- 2Already-produced durable goods available for use as a factor of production, such as tools and bulldozers (equipment) and office buildings (structures).
- 3The capitalist class; investors considered collectively with respect to their societal (economic, political, cultural, etc.) influence.
- 4A city designated as a legislative seat by the government or some other authority, often the city in which the government is located; otherwise the most important city within a country or a subdivision of it.
- 5The most important city in the field specified.
- 6An uppercase letter.
- 7Knowledge; awareness; proficiency.
- 8The chief or most important thing.
Etymology
From Middle English capital, borrowed partly from Old French capital and partly from Latin capitālis (“of the head”) (in sense “head of cattle”), from caput (“head”) (English cap) + -ālis (suffix forming adjectives). Use in trade and finance originated in Medieval economies when a common but expensive transaction involved trading heads of cattle. The noun is from the adjective. Compare chattel and kith and kine (“all one’s possessions”), which also use “cow” to mean “property”. Doublet of cattle and chattel.
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: acpital,caiptal,capiatl,capitall,capitla,capittal,cappital,captial,ccapital,cpaital
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for capital
Misspelling Variants of "capital"
Frequency rank: #1,044 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter C in our English index: