hotel
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
Letters
5 characters
Language
English
word origin
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "hotel", 5-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 "hotel" 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 "hotel" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
hotel is aEnglishnoun. It means: A large town house or mansion; a grand private residence, especially in France. Pronounced /həʊˈtɛl/. It ranks #1,191 in English word frequency. Often confused with Howe and howl.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | hotel |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /həʊˈtɛl/ |
| Letters | 5 |
| Frequency rank | #1,191 |
| Misspellings tracked | 7 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for hotel is 5 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /həʊˈtɛl/. Corpus data places it at rank #1,191 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 7 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 7 documented wrong-spelling variants for hotel, with forms such as "hhotel", "hoetl", and "hotell". 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, "Howe", "howl", "hove", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: Etymology tree Proto-Italic *hostipotjālis Latin hospitālis Old French ostel Middle French hostel French hôtelbor. English hotel Borrowed from French hôtel, from Middle French hostel, from Old French ostel, from Late Latin hospitālis (“hospice, shelter, gue… 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 hotel, spelled H-O-T-E-L, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1A large town house or mansion; a grand private residence, especially in France.
- 2An establishment that provides accommodation and other services for paying guests; normally larger than a guesthouse, and often one of a chain.
- 3A public house or pub.
- 4A restaurant; any dining establishment.
- 5Alternative letter-case form of Hotel from the NATO/ICAO Phonetic Alphabet.
- 6The larger red property in the game of Monopoly, in contradistinction to houses.
- 7The guest accommodation and dining section of a cruise ship.
Etymology
Etymology tree Proto-Italic *hostipotjālis Latin hospitālis Old French ostel Middle French hostel French hôtelbor. English hotel Borrowed from French hôtel, from Middle French hostel, from Old French ostel, from Late Latin hospitālis (“hospice, shelter, guesthouse”), from Latin hospitālis (“hospitable”). Doublet of hostel and hospital.
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: hhotel,hoetl,hotell,hotle,hottel,htoel,ohtel
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for hotel
Misspelling Variants of "hotel"
Frequency rank: #1,191 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter H in our English index: