hate

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for hate is 4 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /heʔ/. Corpus data places it at rank #807 in overall English word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language.Wiktionary records 4 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 hate, with forms such as "ahte", "haet", and "hatte". 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, "he", "hit", "hot", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English hate (noun), probably from Old English hatian (“to hate”, verb) and/or Old Norse hatr (“hate”, noun). Merged with Middle English hete, hæte, heate (“hate”), from Old English hete, from Proto-Germanic *hataz (“hatred, hate”), from Proto-I… 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 hate, spelled H-A-T-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.