epicene
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 "epicene", 7-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 "epicene" 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 "epicene" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
epicene is anEnglishadj. It means: Of or relating to a class of Greek and Latin nouns that may refer to males or females but have a fixed grammatical gender (feminine, masculine, neuter, etc.). Pronounced /ˈɛp.ɪˌsiːn/.
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Browse all word comparisons →| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | epicene |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Adj |
| IPA | /ˈɛp.ɪˌsiːn/ |
| Letters | 7 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for epicene is 7 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈɛp.ɪˌsiːn/. It sits outside the most-frequent rank tiers, which is often why uncommon words generate more spelling variants per reader.Wiktionary records 6 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
No frequent misspelling variants are recorded for epicene 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 Late Middle English epicene, epicen, epicin, epcyn, episcen, epycen, epycene, epycyn, ypsen (“(grammar) having only one form for masculine and feminine gender, common”), from Late Latin epicoenos, epicoenus (“of a noun: applicable to either males or fe… 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 epicene, spelled E-P-I-C-E-N-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1Of or relating to a class of Greek and Latin nouns that may refer to males or females but have a fixed grammatical gender (feminine, masculine, neuter, etc.).
- 2Of or relating to nouns or pronouns in any language that have a single form for male and female referents.
- 3Suitable for use regardless of sex; unisex.
- 4Of indeterminate sex, whether asexual, androgynous, hermaphrodite, or intersex; of a human face, intermediate in form between a man's face and a woman's face.
- 5Indeterminate; mixed.
- 6Of a man: effeminate.
Etymology
From Late Middle English epicene, epicen, epicin, epcyn, episcen, epycen, epycene, epycyn, ypsen (“(grammar) having only one form for masculine and feminine gender, common”), from Late Latin epicoenos, epicoenus (“of a noun: applicable to either males or females”), Latin epicoenon (“noun applicable to either males or females; grammatical gender of such nouns”), from Ancient Greek ἐπίκοινος (epíkoinos, “common to many people, things, etc.; promiscuous, sluttish”) (compare γένος ἐπίκοινον (génos epíkoinon, “common gender”)), from ἐπι- (epi-, prefix meaning ‘on, upon; on top of; all over’) + κοινός (koinós, “common; general, public”) (ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *ḱóm (“beside, by, near, with”) + *-yós (suffix forming adjectives from noun stems)).
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter E in our English index: