help
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
Letters
4 characters
Language
English
word origin
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "help", 4-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 "help" 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 "help" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
help is aEnglishnoun. It means: Action given to provide assistance; aid. Pronounced /hɛlp/. It ranks #171 in English word frequency. Often confused with HP and her.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | help |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /hɛlp/ |
| Letters | 4 |
| Frequency rank | #171 |
| Misspellings tracked | 6 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for help is 4 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /hɛlp/. Corpus data places it at rank #171 in overall English word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language.Wiktionary records 6 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 6 documented wrong-spelling variants for help, with forms such as "ehlp", "hellp", and "helpp". 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, "HP", "her", "hey", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English help, from Old English help (“help, aid, assistance, relief”), from Proto-Germanic *helpō (“help”), *hilpiz, *hulpiz, from Proto-Indo-European *ḱelb-, *ḱelp- (“to help”). Cognate with Saterland Frisian Hälpe (“help”), West Frisian help (… 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 help, spelled H-E-L-P, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1Action given to provide assistance; aid.
- 2Something or someone which provides assistance with a task.
- 3Documentation provided with computer software that could be accessed using the computer.
- 4A study aid.
- 5One or more people employed to help in the maintenance of a house or the operation of a farm or enterprise.
- 6Correction of deficits, as by psychological counseling or medication or social support or remedial training.
Etymology
From Middle English help, from Old English help (“help, aid, assistance, relief”), from Proto-Germanic *helpō (“help”), *hilpiz, *hulpiz, from Proto-Indo-European *ḱelb-, *ḱelp- (“to help”). Cognate with Saterland Frisian Hälpe (“help”), West Frisian help (“help”), Cimbrian hölfe (“help”), Dutch hulp (“help”), German Hilfe (“help, aid, assistance”), Luxembourgish Hëllef (“help”), Mòcheno hilf (“help”), Vilamovian hyłf (“help”), Yiddish הילף (hilf, “help”), Danish hjælp (“help”), Faroese, Icelandic hjálp (“help”), Norwegian Bokmål hjelp (“help”), Norwegian Nynorsk hjelp, hjølp (“help”), Swedish hjälp (“help”).
Synonyms
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: ehlp,hellp,helpp,hepl,hhelp,hlep
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for help
Misspelling Variants of "help"
Frequency rank: #171 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter H in our English index: