Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "email", 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 "email" 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 "email" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
email is aEnglishnoun. It means: A system for sending messages and datas by means of a computer network, primarily the Internet, using the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol and the Internet Message Format. Pronounced /ˈiːmeɪl/. It ranks #2,107 in English word frequency. Often confused with evil and emit.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /ˈiːmeɪl/ |
| Letters | 5 |
| Frequency rank | #2,107 |
| Misspellings tracked | 6 |
| Confusable pairs | 10 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for email is 5 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈiːmeɪl/. Corpus data places it at rank #2,107 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 4 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 6 documented wrong-spelling variants for email, with forms such as "eamil", "emaill", and "emali". 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 10 confusable-pair relationships, "evil", "emit", "Emil", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: The noun is an abbreviation of electronic mail. First attested in the 1970s. The verb is derived from the noun, by analogy with mail (“to send through the mail”). 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 email, spelled E-M-A-I-L, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1A system for sending messages and datas by means of a computer network, primarily the Internet, using the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol and the Internet Message Format.
- 2The quantity of messages sent through an email system.
- 3A message being sent through email.
- 4An email address.
Etymology
The noun is an abbreviation of electronic mail. First attested in the 1970s. The verb is derived from the noun, by analogy with mail (“to send through the mail”).
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: eamil,emaill,emali,emial,emmail,meail
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for email
Misspelling Variants of "email"
Frequency rank: #2,107 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter E in our English index: