dog-eared
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
Letters
9 characters
Language
English
word origin
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "dog-eared", 9-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 "dog-eared" 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 "dog-eared" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
dog-eared is anEnglishadj. It means: Of a page in a book or other publication: having its corner folded down, either due to having been read many times, or intentionally as a sort of bookmark. Pronounced /ˈdɒɡɪəd/.
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See how dog-eared compares against similar English words.
Browse all word comparisons →| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | dog-eared |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Adj |
| IPA | /ˈdɒɡɪəd/ |
| Letters | 9 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for dog-eared is 9 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈdɒɡɪəd/. It sits outside the most-frequent rank tiers, which is often why uncommon words generate more spelling variants per reader.Wiktionary records 2 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
No frequent misspelling variants are recorded for dog-eared 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 dog + eared (“having ears (of a specified type)”), modelled after dog’s-ear (obsolete), due to the similarity of their appearance to the folded ears of certain dogs. The word is analysable as dog-ear (“to fold the corner of a book’s page”) + -ed (suffi… 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 dog-eared, spelled D-O-G---E-A-R-E-D, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1Of a page in a book or other publication: having its corner folded down, either due to having been read many times, or intentionally as a sort of bookmark.
- 2Ragged, worn-out; also, hackneyed, tired.
Etymology
From dog + eared (“having ears (of a specified type)”), modelled after dog’s-ear (obsolete), due to the similarity of their appearance to the folded ears of certain dogs. The word is analysable as dog-ear (“to fold the corner of a book’s page”) + -ed (suffix forming possessional adjectives) (dog-ear is attested in print later than dog-eared).
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter D in our English index: