home
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 "home", 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 "home" 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 "home" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
home is aEnglishnoun. It means: A dwelling. Pronounced /həʊm/. It ranks #149 in English word frequency. Often confused with how and hot.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | home |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /həʊm/ |
| Letters | 4 |
| Frequency rank | #149 |
| Misspellings tracked | 4 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for home is 4 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /həʊm/. Corpus data places it at rank #149 in overall English word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language.Wiktionary records 15 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 4 documented wrong-spelling variants for home, with forms such as "hhome", "hmoe", and "hoem". 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, "how", "hot", "hop", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English hōm, from Old English hām, from Proto-West Germanic *haim, from Proto-Germanic *haimaz (“home, village”), from Proto-Indo-European *ḱóymos (“village, home”), from the root *tḱey-. Doublet of heyem. Cognates Cognate with Scots hame (“home… 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 home, spelled H-O-M-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1A dwelling.
- 2A dwelling.
- 3A dwelling.
- 4A dwelling.
- 5A dwelling.
- 6A dwelling.
- 7A dwelling.
- 8One’s native land; the place or country in which one dwells; the place where one’s ancestors dwell or dwelt.
- 9The locality where a thing is usually found, or was first found, or where it is naturally abundant; habitat; seat.
- 10A focus point.
- 11A focus point.
- 12A focus point.
- 13A focus point.
- 14A focus point.
- 15Clipping of home directory.
Etymology
From Middle English hōm, from Old English hām, from Proto-West Germanic *haim, from Proto-Germanic *haimaz (“home, village”), from Proto-Indo-European *ḱóymos (“village, home”), from the root *tḱey-. Doublet of heyem. Cognates Cognate with Scots hame (“home”), Yola haime, hime, hyme (“home”), Saterland Frisian Heem (“home”), Alemannic German haim, hei, heim, hemmu (“home”), Bavarian hama, hame (“home”), Cimbrian hòam, huam (“home”), Dutch heem, heim (“home”), German Heim (“home”), Limburgish heim, Héïm (“home”), Luxembourgish Heem (“home”), Mòcheno hoa'm (“home”), Vilamovian ham, hām, haom (“home”), Yiddish היים (heym, “home”), Danish hjem (“home”), Faroese, Icelandic heim (“home”), heimur (“world”), Norwegian Bokmål heim, hjem (“home”), Norwegian Nynorsk heim (“home”), Swedish hem (“home”), Gothic 𐌷𐌰𐌹𐌼𐍃 (haims, “village”), Irish caoimh (“dear”), Lithuanian kaimas (“village”), šeima (“family”), Albanian komb (“nation, people”), Old Church Slavonic сѣмь (sěmĭ, “seed”), Ancient Greek κώμη (kṓmē, “village”), from Proto-Indo-European *ḱey- (“to lie”) (compare Hittite [script needed] (kittari, “it lies”), Ancient Greek κεῖμαι (keîmai, “to lie down”), Latin civis (“citizen”), Avestan 𐬯𐬀𐬉𐬙𐬈 (saēte, “he lies, rests”), Sanskrit शये (śáye, “he lies”)).
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: hhome,hmoe,hoem,ohme
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for home
Misspelling Variants of "home"
Frequency rank: #149 in English
Frequently Asked Questions
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter H in our English index: