extinct
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
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7 characters
Language
English
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "extinct", 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 "extinct" 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 "extinct" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
extinct is anEnglishadj. It means: Of fire, etc.: no longer alight; of a light, etc.: no longer shining; extinguished, quenched. Pronounced /ɪkˈstɪŋkt/. Often confused with extract and extent.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | extinct |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Adj |
| IPA | /ɪkˈstɪŋkt/ |
| Letters | 7 |
| Frequency rank | #11,889 |
| Misspellings tracked | 11 |
| Confusable pairs | 3 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for extinct is 7 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ɪkˈstɪŋkt/. Corpus data places it at rank #11,889 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 7 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 11 documented wrong-spelling variants for extinct, with forms such as "etxinct", "exitnct", and "exticnt". 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 3 confusable-pair relationships, "extract", "extent", "extant", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Late Middle English extinct (“eliminated, eradicated, extinguished”), from Latin extīnctus, exstīnctus (“extinguished, quenched; destroyed, killed; made extinct”), the perfect passive participles of extinguō, exstinguō (“to extinguish, put out, quench;… 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 extinct, spelled E-X-T-I-N-C-T, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1Of fire, etc.: no longer alight; of a light, etc.: no longer shining; extinguished, quenched.
- 2Of feelings, a person's spirit, a state of affairs, etc.: put out, as if like a fire; quenched, suppressed.
- 3Of customs, ideas, laws and legal rights, offices, organizations, languages, etc.: no longer existing or in use; defunct, discontinued, obsolete; specifically, of a title of nobility: no longer having any person qualified to hold it.
- 4Of an animal or plant species or group of species, a group of people, a family, etc., having no living members, representatives, or descendants.
- 5Of a geological feature: no longer active; specifically, of a volcano: no longer erupting.
- 6Of a radioisotope: no longer occurring primordially due to having decayed away completely, because it has a relatively short half-life.
- 7Of a person: dead; also, permanently separated from others.
Etymology
From Late Middle English extinct (“eliminated, eradicated, extinguished”), from Latin extīnctus, exstīnctus (“extinguished, quenched; destroyed, killed; made extinct”), the perfect passive participles of extinguō, exstinguō (“to extinguish, put out, quench; (figurative) to abolish; to destroy, kill”), from ex- (prefix meaning ‘away; out’) + stinguō (“to extinguish, put out, quench”) (from Proto-Indo-European *stengʷ- (“to push”)). The Middle English word displaced Middle English aqueint, aquenched (“extinct; extinguished”). Doublet of extinguish.
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: etxinct,exitnct,exticnt,extincct,extinctt,extinnct,extintc,extnict,exttinct,exxtinct,xetinct
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for extinct
Misspelling Variants of "extinct"
Frequency rank: #11,889 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter E in our English index: