cheese
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
Letters
6 characters
Language
English
word origin
Source
Wiktionary
open dictionary
Access
Free
no sign-up needed
Detailed reference entry for the English word "cheese", 6-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 "cheese" 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 "cheese" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
cheese is aEnglishnoun. It means: A dairy product made from curdled or cultured milk. Pronounced /t͡ʃiːz/. It ranks #2,617 in English word frequency. Often confused with chose and chest.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | cheese |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /t͡ʃiːz/ |
| Letters | 6 |
| Frequency rank | #2,617 |
| Misspellings tracked | 8 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for cheese is 6 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /t͡ʃiːz/. Corpus data places it at rank #2,617 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 15 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 8 documented wrong-spelling variants for cheese, with forms such as "ccheese", "cehese", and "cheees". 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, "chose", "chest", "chess", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: Etymology tree Latin cāseusbor. Proto-Germanic *kāsijaz Proto-West Germanic *kāsī Old English ċīese Middle English chese English cheese From Middle English chese, from Anglian Old English ċīese, from Proto-West Germanic *kāsī, borrowed from Latin cāseus. Do… 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 cheese, spelled C-H-E-E-S-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1A dairy product made from curdled or cultured milk.
- 2Any particular variety of cheese.
- 3A piece of cheese, especially one moulded into a large round shape during manufacture.
- 4A thick variety of jam (fruit preserve), as distinguished from a thinner variety (sometimes called jelly)
- 5A substance resembling cream cheese, such as lemon cheese
- 6That which is melodramatic, overly emotional, or cliché, i.e. cheesy.
- 7Money.
- 8In skittles, the roughly ovoid object that is thrown to knock down the skittles.
- 9A fastball.
- 10A dangerous mixture of black tar heroin and crushed Tylenol PM tablets. The resulting powder resembles grated cheese and is snorted.
- 11Smegma.
- 12Holed pattern of circuitry to decrease pattern density.
- 13A mass of pomace, or ground apples, pressed together in the shape of a cheese.
- 14The flat, circular, mucilaginous fruit of dwarf mallow (Malva rotundifolia) or marshmallow (Althaea officinalis).
- 15A low curtsey; so called on account of the cheese shape assumed by a woman's dress when she stoops after extending the skirts by a rapid gyration.
Etymology
Etymology tree Latin cāseusbor. Proto-Germanic *kāsijaz Proto-West Germanic *kāsī Old English ċīese Middle English chese English cheese From Middle English chese, from Anglian Old English ċīese, from Proto-West Germanic *kāsī, borrowed from Latin cāseus. Doublet of queso. Cognate with Saterland Frisian Síes (“cheese”), West Frisian tsiis (“cheese”), Dutch kaas (“cheese”), German Low German Kees (“cheese”), German Käse (“cheese”).
Antonyms
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: ccheese,cehese,cheees,cheesse,chese,chesee,chheese,hceese
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for cheese
Misspelling Variants of "cheese"
Frequency rank: #2,617 in English
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you spell "cheese"?
What does "cheese" mean?
What words are commonly confused with "cheese"?
How do you pronounce "cheese"?
What is the origin of the word "cheese"?
Is PlainSpell free to use?
Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter C in our English index: