glaucous
/ˈɡlɔː.kəs/
"glaucous" is a 8-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“glaucous” is uncommon English (frequency #82,334 among 2,313 “G” headwords), classed as an adjective. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- #82,334
- frequency rank, English
- 2,313
- “G” headwords
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - Of a pale grey or bluish-green, especially when covered with a powdery residue.
Corpus desk
Index EN-glaucous · glaucous · English
glaucous · rank #82,334 · 0 variants · 0 confusables
- FREQ-RARE #82,334
- LEN-LONG 8 letters
- VOW-4 4 vowels
- CONFUS-0 No pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-MID 2,313
- PHOTO-FINISH glia
Nearest frequency peer: glia (+1 rank slots)
Read with this headword: Spelling guide for this pattern
Desk codes from Wiktionary headword shape, FrequencyWords rank tier, confusable-pair count, generated misspelling depth, letter-cohort book size, and photo-finish peer. Not a difficulty grade.
Long-tail ranks near “glaucous”
Sparse band: bars invert rank so rarer forms read shorter
- geosynchron…
geosynchronous
17,672 corpus weight
- Gervase
Gervase
17,671 corpus weight
- glaucous
glaucous
17,667 corpus weight
- glia
glia
17,666 corpus weight
- glowy
glowy
17,663 corpus weight
- goby
goby
17,662 corpus weight
What this shows Long-tail view: where “glaucous” sits against similarly uncommon English ranks.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | glaucous |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Adjective |
| IPA | /ˈɡlɔː.kəs/ |
| Letters | 8 |
| Frequency rank | #82,334 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Long-tail rank of “glaucous” in English
Rare enough to double-check
glaucous is uncommon English at frequency #82,334 among 2,313 “G” headwords, classed as anadjective, transcribed /ˈɡlɔː.kəs/. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. 2 senses are on record.
No misspelling variants are generated for glaucous in our index, a straightforward case of a spelling with little room for common typos. This entry stands alone in our confusable dataset, which tends to mean the word is visually distinctive enough to stand on its own.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Latin glaucus, from Ancient Greek γλαυκός (glaukós, “blue-green, blue-grey”), 1670s. See Irish glas. The correct English form is glaucous, spelled G-L-A-U-C-O-U-S.
Definition
- 1Of a pale grey or bluish-green, especially when covered with a powdery residue.
- 2Covered with a bloom or a pale powdery covering, regardless of colour.
Recorded use
Wiktionary examplesThese source excerpts show how glaucous appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
I realised I was the only shopper in that rather eerie place where I moved about fishlike, in a glaucous aquarium […]
[…] inside you could see the wires and cables that ran aft to the rudder and elevators and the cracked and curled and sunblacked leather of the seats and in their tarnished nickel bezels the glass of instrument dials glaucous and clouded from the pumicing of the desert sands.
Etymology
From Latin glaucus, from Ancient Greek γλαυκός (glaukós, “blue-green, blue-grey”), 1670s. See Irish glas.
This word in other languages
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA); frequency ordering uses the FrequencyWords open word-frequency list (2018 English corpus, MIT). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Similar English words by spelling shape
Same letter count and similar misspelling depth for "glaucous", not the corpus desk frequency band.
Same letter count
Frequency-ranked English headwords with 8 letters (nearest by frequency rank).