card
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 "card", 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 "card" 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 "card" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
card is aEnglishnoun. It means: A playing card. Pronounced /kɑːd/. It ranks #964 in English word frequency. Often confused with CD and CR.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | card |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /kɑːd/ |
| Letters | 4 |
| Frequency rank | #964 |
| Misspellings tracked | 6 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for card is 4 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /kɑːd/. Corpus data places it at rank #964 in overall English word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language.Wiktionary records 26 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 6 documented wrong-spelling variants for card, with forms such as "acrd", "cadr", and "cardd". 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, "CD", "CR", "cat", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English carde (“playing card”), from Old French carte, from Latin charta, from Ancient Greek χάρτης (khártēs, “paper, papyrus”). Doublet of carte and chart. 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 card, spelled C-A-R-D, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1A playing card.
- 2Any game using playing cards; a card game.
- 3A resource or argument, used to achieve a purpose. (See play the something card.)
- 4Any flat, normally rectangular piece of stiff paper, plastic, etc.
- 5A bank card.
- 6Any electronic payment (rather than a cash payment using notes, bills or coins).
- 7Paper that is thicker and more durable than normal writing or printing paper, but thinner and more flexible than paperboard, used for postcards, playing cards, etc.; card stock.
- 8A map or chart.
- 9An amusing or entertaining person, often slightly eccentric.
- 10A list of scheduled events or of performers or contestants; chiefly used in professional wrestling.
- 11A tabular presentation of the key statistics of an innings or match: batsmen’s scores and how they were dismissed, extras, total score and bowling figures.
- 12A removable electronic device that may be inserted into a powered electronic device to provide additional capability.
- 13Any of a set of pages or forms that the user can navigate between, and fill with data, in certain user interfaces.
- 14A greeting card.
- 15A business card.
- 16A title card or intertitle: a piece of filmed, printed text edited into the midst of the photographed action at various points, generally to convey character dialogue or descriptive narrative material related to the plot.
- 17A test card.
- 18In formal debating, a verbatim citation used as evidence for a point.
- 19A published note, containing a brief statement, explanation, request, expression of thanks, etc.
- 20A printed programme.
- 21An attraction or inducement.
- 22Ellipsis of compass card.
- 23A perforated pasteboard or sheet-metal plate for warp threads, making part of the Jacquard apparatus of a loom.
- 24A graph formed from a given graph by deleting one vertex.
- 25An indicator card.
- 26Ellipsis of report card.
Etymology
From Middle English carde (“playing card”), from Old French carte, from Latin charta, from Ancient Greek χάρτης (khártēs, “paper, papyrus”). Doublet of carte and chart.
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: acrd,cadr,cardd,carrd,ccard,crad
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for card
Misspelling Variants of "card"
Frequency rank: #964 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter C in our English index: