glow
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
Letters
4 characters
Language
English
word origin
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "glow", 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 "glow" 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 "glow" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
glow is aEnglishverb. It means: To emit heat and light without a flame. Pronounced /ɡləʊ/. It ranks #8,151 in English word frequency. Often confused with go and got.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | glow |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Verb |
| IPA | /ɡləʊ/ |
| Letters | 4 |
| Frequency rank | #8,151 |
| Misspellings tracked | 6 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for glow is 4 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ɡləʊ/. Corpus data places it at rank #8,151 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 12 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 glow, with forms such as "gglow", "gllow", and "gloww". 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, "go", "got", "god", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: The verb is derived from Middle English glouen, glowen (“to give off heat and light without flame; of a thing: to be heated until red hot; to be brightly coloured; to shine brightly; (figurative) to be filled with emotion; of the face, etc.: to turn red, fl… 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 glow, spelled G-L-O-W, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1To emit heat and light without a flame.
- 2Of a fire: to emit heat and light.
- 3To emit light brightly and steadily as if heated to a high temperature; to shine.
- 4To be very hot; also, to be on fire; to burn.
- 5Of a colour: to be bright; also, of a thing: to have a bright colour.
- 6Of a person: to display intense emotion.
- 7Of a person's body or a part of it: to feel hot and often to flush (“become suffused with a reddish colour”) as well, due to an emotional response, exertion, etc.
- 8To be involved in an (chiefly online) undercover sting operation, especially by American federal agencies.
- 9To create a threatening online post that may involve violence, and look suspicious enough to attract a police investigation.
- 10To emit (flame).
- 11To expose (someone) to the authorities.
- 12To make (something) hot; to heat.
Etymology
The verb is derived from Middle English glouen, glowen (“to give off heat and light without flame; of a thing: to be heated until red hot; to be brightly coloured; to shine brightly; (figurative) to be filled with emotion; of the face, etc.: to turn red, flush; etc.”), and then either: * from Old English glōwan (“to glow”) (a strong verb), from Proto-West Germanic *glōan (“to glow”); or * because the Middle English and modern English words are weak verbs, possibly from Old Norse *glówa, thought to be a variant of glóa (“to glow”), also a weak verb; both from Proto-Germanic *glōaną (“to glow”), ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *ǵʰleh₁- (“to shine, glow; to be shining, glowing”). Possibly a doublet of glass. The noun is derived from the verb. cognates * Dutch gloeien * Finnish loistaa * German glühen * Norwegian glo * Old Norse glóa (Danish glo, Icelandic glóa, Swedish glo) * Saterland Frisian gloie, glöie, gluuje * West Frisian gloeie
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: gglow,gllow,gloww,glwo,golw,lgow
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for glow
Misspelling Variants of "glow"
Frequency rank: #8,151 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter G in our English index: