flight
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
Letters
6 characters
Language
English
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "flight", 6-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 "flight" 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 "flight" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
flight is aEnglishnoun. It means: The act of flying. Pronounced /flaɪt/. It ranks #1,453 in English word frequency. Often confused with flint and flirt.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | flight |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /flaɪt/ |
| Letters | 6 |
| Frequency rank | #1,453 |
| Misspellings tracked | 10 |
| Confusable pairs | 8 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for flight is 6 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /flaɪt/. Corpus data places it at rank #1,453 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 19 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 10 documented wrong-spelling variants for flight, with forms such as "fflight", "filght", and "flgiht". 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 8 confusable-pair relationships, "flint", "flirt", "fought", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *plew- Proto-Indo-European *plewk-der. Proto-Germanic *fleuganą Proto-West Germanic *fleugan Proto-Indo-European *-tis Proto-Germanic *-þiz Proto-West Germanic *-þi Proto-West Germanic *fluhti Old English flyht Middle Engl… 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 flight, spelled F-L-I-G-H-T, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1The act of flying.
- 2An instance of flying.
- 3A collective term for doves or swallows.
- 4A trip made by an aircraft, particularly one between two cities or countries, which is often planned or reserved in advance.
- 5A series of stairs between landings.
- 6A group of canal locks with a short distance between them
- 7A floor which is reached by stairs or escalators.
- 8The feathers on an arrow or dart used to help it follow an even path.
- 9A paper airplane.
- 10The movement of a spinning ball through the air, with its speed, trajectory and drift.
- 11The ballistic trajectory of an arrow or other projectile.
- 12An aerodynamic surface designed to guide such a projectile's trajectory.
- 13An air force unit.
- 14A numbered subclass of a given class of warship, denoting incremental modernizations to the original design.
- 15Several sample glasses of a specific wine varietal or other beverage. The pours are smaller than a full glass and the flight will generally include three to five different samples.
- 16A comparable sample of beers or other drinks.
- 17The shaped material forming the thread of a screw.
- 18An episode of imaginative thinking or dreaming.
- 19An advertising campaign of fixed length.
Etymology
Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *plew- Proto-Indo-European *plewk-der. Proto-Germanic *fleuganą Proto-West Germanic *fleugan Proto-Indo-European *-tis Proto-Germanic *-þiz Proto-West Germanic *-þi Proto-West Germanic *fluhti Old English flyht Middle English flight English flight From Middle English flight, from Old English flyht (“flight”), from Proto-West Germanic *fluhti (“flight”), derived from *fleuganą (“to fly”), from Proto-Indo-European *plewk- (“to fly”), enlargement of *plew- (“flow”). Analyzable as fly + -t (variant of -th). Cognate with West Frisian flecht (“flight”), Dutch vlucht (“flight”), German Flucht (“flight”) (etymology 2).
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: fflight,filght,flgiht,fligght,flighht,flightt,fligth,flihgt,fllight,lfight
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for flight
Misspelling Variants of "flight"
Frequency rank: #1,453 in English
Frequently Asked Questions
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter F in our English index: