culture
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
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7 characters
Language
English
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "culture", 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 "culture" 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 "culture" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
culture is aEnglishnoun. It means: The arts, customs, lifestyles, background, and habits that characterize humankind, or a particular society or nation. Pronounced /ˈkʌlt͡ʃə/. It ranks #987 in English word frequency. Often confused with cultured and capture.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | culture |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /ˈkʌlt͡ʃə/ |
| Letters | 7 |
| Frequency rank | #987 |
| Misspellings tracked | 10 |
| Confusable pairs | 4 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for culture is 7 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈkʌlt͡ʃə/. Corpus data places it at rank #987 in overall English word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language.Wiktionary records 11 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 10 documented wrong-spelling variants for culture, with forms such as "cculture", "cluture", and "cullture". 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 4 confusable-pair relationships, "cultured", "capture", "couture", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle French culture (“cultivation; culture”), from Latin cultūra (“cultivation; culture”), from cultus, perfect passive participle of colō (“till, cultivate, to grow, worship”) (related to colōnus and colōnia), from Proto-Indo-European *kʷel- (“to mo… 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 culture, spelled C-U-L-T-U-R-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1The arts, customs, lifestyles, background, and habits that characterize humankind, or a particular society or nation.
- 2The beliefs, values, behaviour, and material objects that constitute a people's way of life.
- 3The conventional conducts and ideologies of a community; the system comprising the accepted norms and values of a society.
- 4Any knowledge passed from one generation to the next, not necessarily with respect to human beings.
- 5Cultivation.
- 6The process of growing a bacterial or other biological entity in an artificial medium.
- 7The growth thus produced.
- 8A group of bacteria.
- 9The details on a map that do not represent natural features of the area delineated, such as names and the symbols for towns, roads, meridians, and parallels.
- 10Ellipsis of archaeological culture (“recurring assemblage of artifacts from a specific time and place that may constitute the material culture remains of a particular past human society”).
- 11Ethnicity, race (and its associated arts, customs, etc.)
Etymology
From Middle French culture (“cultivation; culture”), from Latin cultūra (“cultivation; culture”), from cultus, perfect passive participle of colō (“till, cultivate, to grow, worship”) (related to colōnus and colōnia), from Proto-Indo-European *kʷel- (“to move; to turn (around)”).
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: cculture,cluture,cullture,cultrue,cultture,cultuer,culturre,culutre,cutlure,uclture
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for culture
Misspelling Variants of "culture"
Frequency rank: #987 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter C in our English index: