grain
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
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5 characters
Language
English
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "grain", 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 "grain" 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 "grain" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
grain is aEnglishnoun. It means: The harvested seeds of various grass food crops eg: wheat, corn, barley. Pronounced /ɡɹeɪn/. It ranks #5,329 in English word frequency. Often confused with gray and grid.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | grain |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /ɡɹeɪn/ |
| Letters | 5 |
| Frequency rank | #5,329 |
| Misspellings tracked | 7 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for grain is 5 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ɡɹeɪn/. Corpus data places it at rank #5,329 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 19 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 grain, with forms such as "garin", "ggrain", and "grainn". 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, "gray", "grid", "grip", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English greyn, grayn, grein, from Old French grain, grein, from Latin grānum (“seed”), from Proto-Indo-European *ǵr̥h₂nóm (“grain”). Doublet of corn, gram, granum, and grao. 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 grain, spelled G-R-A-I-N, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1The harvested seeds of various grass food crops eg: wheat, corn, barley.
- 2Similar seeds from any food crop, e.g., buckwheat, amaranth, quinoa.
- 3A single seed of grass food crops.
- 4The crops from which grain is harvested.
- 5A linear texture of a material or surface.
- 6A single particle of a substance.
- 7Any of various small units of mass originally notionally based on grain's weight, variously standardized at different places and times, including
- 8Any of various small units of mass originally notionally based on grain's weight, variously standardized at different places and times, including
- 9Any of various small units of mass originally notionally based on grain's weight, variously standardized at different places and times, including
- 10Any of various small units of length originally notionally based on a grain's width, variously standardized at different places and times.
- 11The carat grain of ¹⁄₄ carat as a measure of gold purity, creating a 96-point scale between 0% and 100% purity.
- 12A region within a material having a single crystal structure or direction.
- 13The solid piece of fuel in an individual solid-fuel rocket engine.
- 14A reddish dye made from the coccus insect, or kermes; hence, a red color of any tint or hue, as crimson, scarlet, etc.; sometimes used by the poets as equivalent to Tyrian purple.
- 15The hair side of a piece of leather, or the marking on that side.
- 16The remains of grain, etc., after brewing or distillation; hence, any residuum.
- 17A rounded prominence on the back of a sepal, as in the common dock.
- 18Temper; natural disposition; inclination.
- 19Visual texture in processed photographic film due to the presence of small particles of a metallic silver, or dye clouds, developed from silver halide that have received enough photons.
Etymology
From Middle English greyn, grayn, grein, from Old French grain, grein, from Latin grānum (“seed”), from Proto-Indo-European *ǵr̥h₂nóm (“grain”). Doublet of corn, gram, granum, and grao.
Synonyms
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: garin,ggrain,grainn,grani,grian,grrain,rgain
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for grain
Misspelling Variants of "grain"
Frequency rank: #5,329 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter G in our English index: