grade

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for grade is 5 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ɡɹeɪd/. Corpus data places it at rank #1,660 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 15 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 7 documented wrong-spelling variants for grade, with forms such as "garde", "ggrade", and "gradde". 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, "GRE", "gray", "grid", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: Borrowed from Middle French grade (“a grade, degree”), from Latin gradus (“a step, pace, degree”), from Proto-Italic *graðus, from Proto-Indo-European *gʰradʰ-, *gʰredʰ- (“to walk, go”). Doublet of gradus. Cognate with Gothic 𐌲𐍂𐌹𐌸𐍃 (griþs, “step, grade… 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 grade, spelled G-R-A-D-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.