controller
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
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10 characters
Language
English
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "controller", 10-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 "controller" 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 "controller" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
controller is aEnglishnoun. It means: One who controls something. Pronounced /kənˈtɹəʊlə/. It ranks #5,776 in English word frequency. Often confused with controllers and controlled.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | controller |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /kənˈtɹəʊlə/ |
| Letters | 10 |
| Frequency rank | #5,776 |
| Misspellings tracked | 14 |
| Confusable pairs | 3 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for controller is 10 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /kənˈtɹəʊlə/. Corpus data places it at rank #5,776 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 9 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 14 documented wrong-spelling variants for controller, with forms such as "ccontroller", "cnotroller", and "conntroller". 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, "controllers", "controlled", "comptroller", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English countreroller, from Anglo-Norman contreroulour and Middle French contreroleur (French contrôleur), from Medieval Latin contrārotulātor, from *contrārotulāre (from which control). Doublet of comptroller. By surface analysis, control + -er. 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 controller, spelled C-O-N-T-R-O-L-L-E-R, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1One who controls something.
- 2Any electric or mechanical device for controlling a circuit or system.
- 3The chief accounting officer which audits, and manages the financial affairs of a company or government; a comptroller.
- 4A mechanism that controls or regulates the operation of a machine, especially a peripheral device in a computer.
- 5A hardware device designed to allow the user to play video games.
- 6An iron block, usually bolted to a ship's deck, for controlling the running out of a chain cable. The links of the cable tend to drop into hollows in the block, and thus hold fast until disengaged.
- 7The person who supervises and handles communication with an agent in the field.
- 8The subject of a control verb. See Control (linguistics)
- 9In software applications using the model-view-controller design pattern, the part or parts of the application that treat input and output, forming an interface between models and views.
Etymology
From Middle English countreroller, from Anglo-Norman contreroulour and Middle French contreroleur (French contrôleur), from Medieval Latin contrārotulātor, from *contrārotulāre (from which control). Doublet of comptroller. By surface analysis, control + -er.
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: ccontroller,cnotroller,conntroller,conrtoller,contorller,contrloler,controlelr,controler,controllerr,controllre,contrroller,conttroller,cotnroller,ocntroller
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for controller
Misspelling Variants of "controller"
Frequency rank: #5,776 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter C in our English index: