homo sapiens
"homo-sapiens" is a 11-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“homo sapiens” is uncommon English (outside the top frequency list), classed as a noun. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency English
- 12
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - A human being (Homo sapiens).
Corpus desk
Index EN-homo-sapiens · homo sapiens · English
homo sapiens · unranked · 0 variants · 0 confusables
- FREQ-UNRANKED Unranked
- LEN-MEGA 12 letters
- VOW-5 5 vowels
- CONFUS-0 No pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-THIN "H" thin
- PHOTO-UNK Peer pending
Read with this headword: Spelling guide for this pattern
Desk codes from Wiktionary headword shape, FrequencyWords rank tier, confusable-pair count, generated misspelling depth, letter-cohort book size, and photo-finish peer. Not a difficulty grade.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | homo sapiens |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| Letters | 12 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Long-tail rank of “homo sapiens” in English
Rare enough to double-check
homo sapiens is uncommon English outside the top frequency list, classed as anoun. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. Gloss: "A human being (Homo sapiens).".
The misspelling generator found no plausible variants for homo sapiens, and the word's spelling is regular enough that our generator found nothing worth flagging. It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, since nothing in our dataset looks or sounds close enough to cause mix-ups.
Etymologically, the entry records: Learned borrowing from New Latin homō sapiēns, from Latin homō (“human being”) + sapiēns (“wise, sensible, judicious”). The correct English form is homo sapiens, spelled H-O-M-O- -S-A-P-I-E-N-S.
Definition
- 1A human being (Homo sapiens).
Recorded use
Wiktionary examplesThese source excerpts show how homo sapiens appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
[…] let’s take a look at the scenery tell me what do you think when you see all this pile-up of people these multitudes of man this humongosity of humanity this superabundance of homo sapiens ah well what I see is we’re in the barrio poor folk’s part of town where you find the masses […]
According to data from the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is over 415 parts per million (ppm), far higher than at any point in the last 800,000 years, since before the evolution of homo sapiens.
Etymology
Learned borrowing from New Latin homō sapiēns, from Latin homō (“human being”) + sapiēns (“wise, sensible, judicious”).
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.