dot
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
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3 characters
Language
English
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "dot", 3-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 "dot" 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 "dot" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
dot is aEnglishnoun. It means: A small, round spot. Pronounced /dɒt/. It ranks #6,564 in English word frequency. Often confused with Dr and DS.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | dot |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /dɒt/ |
| Letters | 3 |
| Frequency rank | #6,564 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for dot is 3 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /dɒt/. Corpus data places it at rank #6,564 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 13 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
No frequent misspelling variants are recorded for dot in our index, suggesting the orthography either follows predictable English patterns or the word is uncommon enough that typo corpora lack signal.It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "Dr", "DS", "DT", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English *dot, dotte, from Old English dott (“a dot, point”), from Proto-West Germanic *dott, from Proto-Germanic *duttaz (“wisp”). Cognate with Saterland Frisian Dot, Dotte (“a clump”), Dutch dot (“lump, knot, clod”), Low German Dutte (“a plug”)… 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 dot, spelled D-O-T, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1A small, round spot.
- 2A punctuation mark used to indicate the end of a sentence or an abbreviated part of a word; a full stop; a period.
- 3A point used as a diacritical mark above or below various letters of the Latin script, as in Ȧ, Ạ, Ḅ, Ḃ, Ċ.
- 4A symbol used for separating the fractional part of a decimal number from the whole part, for indicating multiplication or a scalar product, or for various other purposes.
- 5in musical notation, a symbol in the form of a small point placed after a note, indicating that its duration is to be augmented by 50%.
- 6One of the two symbols used in Morse code.
- 7A lump or clot.
- 8Anything small and like a speck comparatively; a small portion or specimen.
- 9A dot ball.
- 10buckshot, projectile from a "dotty" or shotgun
- 11Clipping of dotty (“shotgun”).
- 12confinement facility
- 13Clipping of dotfile
Etymology
From Middle English *dot, dotte, from Old English dott (“a dot, point”), from Proto-West Germanic *dott, from Proto-Germanic *duttaz (“wisp”). Cognate with Saterland Frisian Dot, Dotte (“a clump”), Dutch dot (“lump, knot, clod”), Low German Dutte (“a plug”), dialectal Swedish dott (“a little heap, bunch, clump”).
This word in other languages
Frequency rank: #6,564 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter D in our English index: