country
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
Letters
7 characters
Language
English
word origin
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "country", 7-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 "country" 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 "country" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
country is aEnglishnoun. It means: The territory of a nation; a sovereign state or a region once independent and still distinct in institutions, language, etc. Pronounced /ˈkʌntɹi/. It ranks #313 in English word frequency. Often confused with county and counts.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | country |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /ˈkʌntɹi/ |
| Letters | 7 |
| Frequency rank | #313 |
| Misspellings tracked | 11 |
| Confusable pairs | 7 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for country is 7 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈkʌntɹi/. Corpus data places it at rank #313 in overall English word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language.Wiktionary records 9 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 11 documented wrong-spelling variants for country, with forms such as "ccountry", "conutry", and "counntry". 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 7 confusable-pair relationships, "county", "counts", "courtly", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English contre, contree, contreie, from Old French contree, cuntrede, from Vulgar Latin *(terra) contrata (“(land) lying opposite; (land) spread before one”) (also in Medieval Latin as "country, region"), from Latin contrā (“against, opposite”) … 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 country, spelled C-O-U-N-T-R-Y, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1The territory of a nation; a sovereign state or a region once independent and still distinct in institutions, language, etc.
- 2An area of land of undefined extent; a region, a district.
- 3An area of land of undefined extent; a region, a district.
- 4A rural area, as opposed to a town or city; the countryside.
- 5The inhabitants or people of a district, region, or nation; the populace, the public.
- 6Traditional lands of Indigenous people with embedded cultural, spiritual, cosmological, ecological, and physical attributes and values.
- 7Ellipsis of country music.
- 8The spirit of the country (rural places): the spirit of country folkways; those folkways.
- 9The rock through which a vein of ore or coal runs.
Etymology
From Middle English contre, contree, contreie, from Old French contree, cuntrede, from Vulgar Latin *(terra) contrata (“(land) lying opposite; (land) spread before one”) (also in Medieval Latin as "country, region"), from Latin contrā (“against, opposite”) (whence contra-). Cognate with Scots kintra. Unrelated to county. Displaced native English land in some of its senses. From around 1300 as "area surrounding a walled city or town; the open country." By early 16th century the sense was applied mostly to rural areas, as opposed to towns and cities. Compare typologically Russian страна́ (straná), сторона́ (storoná).
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: ccountry,conutry,counntry,counrty,countrry,countryy,counttry,countyr,coutnry,cuontry,ocuntry
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for country
Misspelling Variants of "country"
Frequency rank: #313 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter C in our English index: