cony
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "cony", 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 "cony" 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 "cony" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
cony is aEnglishnoun. It means: A rabbit, especially the European rabbit, Oryctolagus cuniculus (formerly known as Lepus cuniculus). Pronounced /ˈkəʊ.ni/.
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Browse all word comparisons →| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | cony |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /ˈkəʊ.ni/ |
| Letters | 4 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for cony is 4 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈkəʊ.ni/. It sits outside the most-frequent rank tiers, which is often why uncommon words generate more spelling variants per reader.Wiktionary records 9 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
No frequent misspelling variants are recorded for cony in our index, suggesting the orthography either follows predictable English patterns or the word is uncommon enough that typo corpora lack signal.It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, which tends to mean the word is visually distinctive enough to stand on its own.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English cony, back formation from conies (plural), from Anglo-Norman conis, the plural of connil (“rabbit”), from Latin cunīculus, of unknown origin. Cognate to Catalan conill, Dutch konijn, German Kaninchen, Spanish conejo, and Portuguese coelh… 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 cony, spelled C-O-N-Y, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1A rabbit, especially the European rabbit, Oryctolagus cuniculus (formerly known as Lepus cuniculus).
- 2Rabbit fur.
- 3Locally for other rabbit-like or hyrax-like animals, such as the Cape hyrax (das, dassie) or the pika (Ochotona princeps, formerly Lagomys princeps).
- 4Locally for other rabbit-like or hyrax-like animals, such as the Cape hyrax (das, dassie) or the pika (Ochotona princeps, formerly Lagomys princeps).
- 5A simpleton; one who may be taken in by a cony-catcher.
- 6An edible West Indian fish, a grouper given in different sources as: Epinephelus apua, the hind of Bermuda; nigger-fish, Epinephelus punctatus; Cephalopholis fulva.
- 7Any of certain members of family Epinephelidae of Atlantic groupers, such as mutton hamlets, graysby, Cuban coneys, and rooster hinds.
- 8A burbot.
- 9A woman; a sweetheart.
Etymology
From Middle English cony, back formation from conies (plural), from Anglo-Norman conis, the plural of connil (“rabbit”), from Latin cunīculus, of unknown origin. Cognate to Catalan conill, Dutch konijn, German Kaninchen, Spanish conejo, and Portuguese coelho. The original pronunciation was /ˈkʌni/ (for the spelling, compare honey and money), but the similarity to cunt (and particularly homophony with cunny) led through taboo avoidance both to the word's displacement in the main by rabbit and bunny and to the spelling-pronunciation /ˈkəʊni/ becoming standard.
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter C in our English index: