drove
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
Letters
5 characters
Language
English
word origin
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "drove", 5-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 "drove" 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 "drove" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
drove is aEnglishnoun. It means: A cattle drive or the herd being driven by it; thus, a number of cattle driven to market or new pastures. Pronounced /dɹəʊv/. It ranks #3,876 in English word frequency. Often confused with drown and Druze.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | drove |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /dɹəʊv/ |
| Letters | 5 |
| Frequency rank | #3,876 |
| Misspellings tracked | 7 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for drove is 5 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /dɹəʊv/. Corpus data places it at rank #3,876 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 7 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 7 documented wrong-spelling variants for drove, with forms such as "ddrove", "dorve", and "droev". 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 20 confusable-pair relationships, "drown", "Druze", "droves", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English drove, drof, draf, from Old English drāf (“action of driving; a driving out, expulsion; drove, herd, band; company, band; road along which cattle are driven”), from Proto-Germanic *draibō (“a drive, push, movement, drove”), from Proto-In… 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 drove, spelled D-R-O-V-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1A cattle drive or the herd being driven by it; thus, a number of cattle driven to market or new pastures.
- 2A large number of people on the move.
- 3A group of hares.
- 4A road or track along which cattle are habitually, used to be or could be driven; a droveway.
- 5A narrow drain or channel used in the irrigation of land.
- 6A broad chisel used to bring stone to a nearly smooth surface.
- 7The grooved surface of stone finished by the drove chisel.
Etymology
From Middle English drove, drof, draf, from Old English drāf (“action of driving; a driving out, expulsion; drove, herd, band; company, band; road along which cattle are driven”), from Proto-Germanic *draibō (“a drive, push, movement, drove”), from Proto-Indo-European *dʰreybʰ- (“to drive, push”). Cognate with Scots drave, dreef (“drove, crowd”), Dutch dreef (“a walkway, wide road with trees, drove”), Middle High German treip (“a drove”), Swedish drev (“a drive, drove”), Icelandic dreif (“a scattering, distribution”). More at drive.
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: ddrove,dorve,droev,drovve,drrove,drvoe,rdove
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for drove
Misspelling Variants of "drove"
Frequency rank: #3,876 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter D in our English index: