class
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 "class", 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 "class" 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 "class" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
class is aEnglishnoun. It means: A group, collection, category or set sharing characteristics or attributes. Pronounced /klɑːs/. It ranks #430 in English word frequency. Often confused with CSS and clay.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | class |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /klɑːs/ |
| Letters | 5 |
| Frequency rank | #430 |
| Misspellings tracked | 6 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for class is 5 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /klɑːs/. Corpus data places it at rank #430 in overall English word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language.Wiktionary records 17 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 class, with forms such as "calss", "cclass", and "clas". 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, "CSS", "clay", "claw", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle French classe, from Latin classis (“a class or division of the people, assembly of people, the whole body of citizens called to arms, the army, the fleet, later a class or division in general”), from Proto-Indo-European *kelh₁- (“to call, shout”… 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 class, spelled C-L-A-S-S, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1A group, collection, category or set sharing characteristics or attributes.
- 2A social grouping, based on job, wealth, etc. In Britain, society is commonly split into three main classes: upper class, middle class and working class.
- 3The division of society into classes.
- 4Admirable behavior; elegance.
- 5A group of students in a regularly scheduled meeting with a teacher.
- 6A series of lessons covering a single subject.
- 7A single lesson in a series.
- 8A group of students who commenced or completed their education during a particular year. A school class.
- 9a grade, standard, level of education.
- 10A category of seats in an airplane, train or other means of mass transportation.
- 11A rank in the classification of organisms, below phylum and above order; a taxon of that rank.
- 12Best of its kind.
- 13A grouping of data values in an interval, often used for computation of a frequency distribution.
- 14A collection of sets definable by a shared property, especially one which is not itself a set (in which case the class is called proper).
- 15A group of people subject to be conscripted in the same military draft, or more narrowly those persons actually conscripted in a particular draft.
- 16A set of objects having the same behavior (but typically differing in state), or a template defining such a set in terms of its common properties, functions, etc.
- 17One of the sections into which a Methodist church or congregation is divided, supervised by a class leader.
Etymology
From Middle French classe, from Latin classis (“a class or division of the people, assembly of people, the whole body of citizens called to arms, the army, the fleet, later a class or division in general”), from Proto-Indo-European *kelh₁- (“to call, shout”). Doublet of clas and classis.
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: calss,cclass,clas,cllass,clsas,lcass
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for class
Misspelling Variants of "class"
Frequency rank: #430 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter C in our English index: