goose
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
Letters
5 characters
Language
English
word origin
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "goose", 5-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 "goose" 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 "goose" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
goose is aEnglishnoun. It means: Any of various grazing waterfowl of the family Anatidae, which have feathers and webbed feet and are capable of flying, swimming, and walking on land, and which are generally bigger than ducks. Pronounced /ɡuːs/. It ranks #9,048 in English word frequency. Often confused with gosh and gore.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | goose |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /ɡuːs/ |
| Letters | 5 |
| Frequency rank | #9,048 |
| Misspellings tracked | 5 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for goose is 5 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ɡuːs/. Corpus data places it at rank #9,048 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 7 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 5 documented wrong-spelling variants for goose, with forms such as "ggoose", "gooes", and "goosse". 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, "gosh", "gore", "goss", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: PIE word *ǵʰh₂éns From Middle English goos, gos, from Old English gōs, from Proto-West Germanic *gans, from Proto-Germanic *gans, from Proto-Indo-European *ǵʰh₂éns. Cognates Compare West Frisian goes, North Frisian göis (also Fering-Öömrang dialect North F… 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 goose, spelled G-O-O-S-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1Any of various grazing waterfowl of the family Anatidae, which have feathers and webbed feet and are capable of flying, swimming, and walking on land, and which are generally bigger than ducks.
- 2A female goose.
- 3The flesh of the goose used as food.
- 4A silly person.
- 5A tailor's iron, heated in live coals or embers, used to press fabrics.
- 6A young woman or girlfriend.
- 7An old English board game in which players moved counters along a board, earning a double move when they reached the picture of a goose.
Etymology
PIE word *ǵʰh₂éns From Middle English goos, gos, from Old English gōs, from Proto-West Germanic *gans, from Proto-Germanic *gans, from Proto-Indo-European *ǵʰh₂éns. Cognates Compare West Frisian goes, North Frisian göis (also Fering-Öömrang dialect North Frisian gus; Sölring dialect North Frisian Guus; Heligoland dialect North Frisian gus), Low German Goos, Gans, Dutch gans, German Gans, Danish, Swedish and Norwegian gås, Icelandic gæs, Irish gé, Latin ānser, Latvian zùoss, Russian гусь (gusʹ), Albanian gatë, Ancient Greek χήν (khḗn), Avestan 𐬰𐬁 (zā), Sanskrit हंस (haṃsá). * The tailor's iron is so called from the likeness of the handle to the neck of a goose.
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: ggoose,gooes,goosse,gosoe,ogose
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for goose
Misspelling Variants of "goose"
Frequency rank: #9,048 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter G in our English index: