eliminate
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 "eliminate", 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 "eliminate" 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 "eliminate" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
eliminate is aEnglishverb. It means: To completely remove, get rid of, put an end to. Pronounced /ɪˈlɪm.ɪ.neɪt/. It ranks #5,594 in English word frequency.
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Browse all word comparisons →| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | eliminate |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Verb |
| IPA | /ɪˈlɪm.ɪ.neɪt/ |
| Letters | 9 |
| Frequency rank | #5,594 |
| Misspellings tracked | 12 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for eliminate is 9 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ɪˈlɪm.ɪ.neɪt/. Corpus data places it at rank #5,594 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 6 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 12 documented wrong-spelling variants for eliminate, with forms such as "eilminate", "eliimnate", and "elimiante". 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 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: Borrowed from Latin ēlīminātus, perfect passive participle of ēlīminō (“to turn out of doors, banish”), from ē- + līmen (“a threshold”, līmin- in compounds) + -ō (first conjugation verb-forming suffix) (see -ate (verb-forming suffix)), akin to Latin līmes (… 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 eliminate, spelled E-L-I-M-I-N-A-T-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1To completely remove, get rid of, put an end to.
- 2To render (a facility) unusable, to destroy it; to disable (a soldier), make them unable to fight (typically but not necessarily by killing)
- 3To kill (a person or animal).
- 4To excrete (waste products).
- 5To exclude (from investigation or from further competition).
- 6To record amounts in a consolidation statement to remove the effects of inter-company transactions.
Etymology
Borrowed from Latin ēlīminātus, perfect passive participle of ēlīminō (“to turn out of doors, banish”), from ē- + līmen (“a threshold”, līmin- in compounds) + -ō (first conjugation verb-forming suffix) (see -ate (verb-forming suffix)), akin to Latin līmes (“a boundary”); see also English limit and limen.
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: eilminate,eliimnate,elimiante,eliminaet,eliminatte,eliminnate,elimintae,elimminate,elimniate,elliminate,elmiinate,leiminate
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for eliminate
Misspelling Variants of "eliminate"
Frequency rank: #5,594 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter E in our English index: