grass
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 "grass", 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 "grass" 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 "grass" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
grass is aEnglishnoun. It means: Any plant of the family Poaceae, characterized by leaves that arise from nodes in the stem and leaf bases that wrap around the stem, especially those grown as ground cover rather than for grain. Pronounced /ɡɹɑːs/. It ranks #3,758 in English word frequency. Often confused with gray and guess.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | grass |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /ɡɹɑːs/ |
| Letters | 5 |
| Frequency rank | #3,758 |
| Misspellings tracked | 5 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for grass is 5 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ɡɹɑːs/. Corpus data places it at rank #3,758 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 5 documented wrong-spelling variants for grass, with forms such as "garss", "ggrass", and "grrass". 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", "guess", "gross", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English gras, from Old English græs, from Proto-West Germanic *gras, from Proto-Germanic *grasą (“grass”), from Proto-Indo-European *gʰreh₁- (“to grow”). Cognates Cognate with Scots gress (“grass”), North Frisian gaars, geers, Gērs, gjars, gjas,… 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 grass, spelled G-R-A-S-S, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1Any plant of the family Poaceae, characterized by leaves that arise from nodes in the stem and leaf bases that wrap around the stem, especially those grown as ground cover rather than for grain.
- 2Any of the various plants that are not in the family Poaceae that resemble grasses.
- 3A lawn.
- 4The outside world, especially in the phrase "touch grass".
- 5Marijuana.
- 6An informer, police informer; one who betrays a group (of criminals, etc) to the authorities.
- 7Sharp, closely spaced discontinuities in the trace of a cathode-ray tube, produced by random interference.
- 8Noise on an A-scope or similar type of radar display.
- 9The season of fresh grass; spring or summer.
- 10That which is transitory.
- 11Asparagus; "sparrowgrass".
- 12The surface of a mine.
Etymology
From Middle English gras, from Old English græs, from Proto-West Germanic *gras, from Proto-Germanic *grasą (“grass”), from Proto-Indo-European *gʰreh₁- (“to grow”). Cognates Cognate with Scots gress (“grass”), North Frisian gaars, geers, Gērs, gjars, gjas, gäärs (“grass”), Saterland Frisian Gäärs (“grass”), West Frisian gers (“grass”), Cimbrian gras, grass (“grass”), German and Luxembourgish Gras (“grass, weed”), Dutch gras (“grass, turf, pasture”), Mòcheno and Vilamovian gros (“grass”), West Flemish ges (“grass”), Yiddish גראָז (groz, “grass”), Danish græs (“grass”), Faroese, Icelandic, and Norwegian Nynorsk gras (“grass”), Norwegian Bokmål gras, gress (“grass”), Swedish gräs (“grass”), Gothic 𐌲𐍂𐌰𐍃 (gras, “herb”); also Latin herba (“plant, weed, grass”), Albanian grath (“grass blade, spike”). Related to grow, green. The "informer" sense is probably a shortening of grasshopper (“police officer, informant”), rhyming slang for copper (“police officer”) or shopper (“informant”); the exact sequence of derivation is unclear.
Synonyms
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: garss,ggrass,grrass,grsas,rgass
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for grass
Misspelling Variants of "grass"
Frequency rank: #3,758 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter G in our English index: