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goodness-gracious

Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.

Letters

17 characters

Language

English

word origin

Source

Wiktionary

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Detailed reference entry for the English word "goodness-gracious", 17-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 "goodness-gracious" 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 "goodness-gracious" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.

goodness gracious is anEnglishintj. It means: Expressing great surprise. Pronounced /ˈɡʊdnɪs ˌɡɹeɪʃəs/.

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Key facts for goodness gracious
PropertyValue
Headwordgoodness gracious
LanguageEnglish
Part of speechIntj
IPA/ˈɡʊdnɪs ˌɡɹeɪʃəs/
Letters17
Misspellings tracked0
Confusable pairs0
SourceWiktionary (kaikki.org)

Frequency rank visualization

goodness gracious is not present in the top-100,000 ranked English corpus, typical for technical, archaic, or low-frequency vocabulary.

Source: Wordfreq corpus

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for goodness gracious is 17 letters long, classified as anintj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈɡʊdnɪs ˌɡɹeɪʃəs/. It sits outside the most-frequent rank tiers, which is often why uncommon words generate more spelling variants per reader.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "Expressing great surprise.".

No frequent misspelling variants are recorded for goodness gracious in our index, suggesting the orthography either follows predictable English patterns or the word is uncommon enough that typo corpora lack signal.It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, which tends to mean the word is visually distinctive enough to stand on its own.

No explicit etymology string is stored for this entry, so spelling patterns must be inferred from the word's phoneme-to-grapheme mapping rather than from a documented borrowing chain. For readers arriving here from a spelling check, the authoritative guidance is: the correct English form is goodness gracious, spelled G-O-O-D-N-E-S-S- -G-R-A-C-I-O-U-S, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.

Definition

  1. 1
    Expressing great surprise.

Synonyms

This word in other languages

Frequently Asked Questions

How do you spell "goodness gracious"?
"goodness gracious" is spelled G-O-O-D-N-E-S-S- -G-R-A-C-I-O-U-S. The IPA pronunciation is /ˈɡʊdnɪs ˌɡɹeɪʃəs/.
What does "goodness gracious" mean?
As an intj, "goodness gracious" means: Expressing great surprise.
How do you pronounce "goodness gracious"?
The IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) transcription for "goodness gracious" is /ˈɡʊdnɪs ˌɡɹeɪʃəs/. Click the speaker icon on the pronunciation badge above to hear it spoken aloud where audio is available.
What language does "goodness gracious" come from?
"goodness gracious" is a English word. PlainSpell covers definitions, pronunciations, and spelling data across English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and German.
Is PlainSpell free to use?
Yes, PlainSpell is a completely free word reference. You can look up definitions, pronunciations, confusable pairs, homophones, and spelling corrections across 5 languages without any sign-up or subscription.

Nearby English words

Other entries that begin with the letter G in our English index:

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Data Source: Wiktionary (via kaikki.org), licensed under CC BY-SA & GFDL. Frequency data from Wordfreq. Misspellings derived from Hunspell dictionaries.