felt
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
Letters
4 characters
Language
English
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "felt", 4-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 "felt" 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 "felt" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
felt is aEnglishnoun. It means: A cloth or stuff made of matted fibres of wool, or wool and fur, fulled or wrought into a compact substance by rolling and pressure, with lees or size, without spinning or weaving. Pronounced /ˈfɛlt/. It ranks #770 in English word frequency. Often confused with FL and few.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | felt |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /ˈfɛlt/ |
| Letters | 4 |
| Frequency rank | #770 |
| Misspellings tracked | 6 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for felt is 4 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈfɛlt/. Corpus data places it at rank #770 in overall English word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language.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 felt, with forms such as "eflt", "fellt", and "feltt". 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, "FL", "few", "fit", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English felt, from Old English felt, from Proto-West Germanic *felt (compare Dutch vilt, German Filz, Danish filt, French feutre), from Proto-Indo-European *pilto, *pilso 'felt' (compare Latin pilleus (“felt”, adjective), Old Church Slavonic плъ… 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 felt, spelled F-E-L-T, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1A cloth or stuff made of matted fibres of wool, or wool and fur, fulled or wrought into a compact substance by rolling and pressure, with lees or size, without spinning or weaving.
- 2A hat made of felt.
- 3A felt-tip pen.
- 4A skin or hide; a fell; a pelt.
Etymology
From Middle English felt, from Old English felt, from Proto-West Germanic *felt (compare Dutch vilt, German Filz, Danish filt, French feutre), from Proto-Indo-European *pilto, *pilso 'felt' (compare Latin pilleus (“felt”, adjective), Old Church Slavonic плъсть (plŭstĭ), Albanian plis, Ancient Greek πῖλος (pîlos)), from *pel- 'to beat'. More at anvil.
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: eflt,fellt,feltt,fetl,ffelt,flet
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for felt
Misspelling Variants of "felt"
Frequency rank: #770 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter F in our English index: