grave

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for grave is 5 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ɡɹeɪv/. Corpus data places it at rank #4,239 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 5 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 grave, with forms such as "garve", "ggrave", and "graev". 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", "grove", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English grave, grafe, from Old English græf, grafu (“cave, grave, trench”), from Proto-West Germanic *grab, from Proto-Germanic *grabą, *grabō (“grave, trench, ditch”), from Proto-Indo-European *gʰrebʰ- (“to dig, scratch, scrape”). Cognate with … 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 grave, spelled G-R-A-V-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.