hostage
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
Letters
7 characters
Language
English
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "hostage", 7-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 "hostage" 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 "hostage" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
hostage is aEnglishnoun. It means: A person given as a pledge or security for the performance of the conditions of a treaty or similar agreement, such as to ensure the status of a vassal. Pronounced /ˈhɒs.tɪd͡ʒ/. It ranks #8,301 in English word frequency. Often confused with hostile and homage.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | hostage |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /ˈhɒs.tɪd͡ʒ/ |
| Letters | 7 |
| Frequency rank | #8,301 |
| Misspellings tracked | 10 |
| Confusable pairs | 2 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for hostage is 7 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈhɒs.tɪd͡ʒ/. Corpus data places it at rank #8,301 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 10 documented wrong-spelling variants for hostage, with forms such as "hhostage", "hosatge", and "hosstage". 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 2 confusable-pair relationships, "hostile", "homage", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English hostage, ostage, from Old French hostage, ostage. This, in turn, is either from Old French hoste (“host”) + -age (in which case the sense development is from taking someone into "lodging" to taking them into "captivity", to applying the … 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 hostage, spelled H-O-S-T-A-G-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1A person given as a pledge or security for the performance of the conditions of a treaty or similar agreement, such as to ensure the status of a vassal.
- 2A person seized in order to compel another party to act (or refrain from acting) in a certain way, because of the threat of harm to the hostage.
- 3Something that constrains one's actions because it is at risk.
- 4One who is compelled by something, especially something that poses a threat; one who is not free to choose their own course of action.
- 5The condition of being held as security or to compel someone else to act or not act in a particular way.
Etymology
From Middle English hostage, ostage, from Old French hostage, ostage. This, in turn, is either from Old French hoste (“host”) + -age (in which case the sense development is from taking someone into "lodging" to taking them into "captivity", to applying the term to a captive), or is from Vulgar Latin obsidāticum (“condition of being held captive”), from Latin obses (“hostage, captive”), with the initial h- added under the influence of hoste or another word. Displaced native Old English ġīsl.
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: hhostage,hosatge,hosstage,hostaeg,hostagge,hostgae,hosttage,hotsage,hsotage,ohstage
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for hostage
Misspelling Variants of "hostage"
Frequency rank: #8,301 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter H in our English index: