hound
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 "hound", 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 "hound" 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 "hound" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
hound is aEnglishnoun. It means: A dog, particularly a breed with a good sense of smell developed for hunting other animals. Pronounced /haʊnd/. Often confused with hun and HUD.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | hound |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /haʊnd/ |
| Letters | 5 |
| Frequency rank | #16,494 |
| Misspellings tracked | 7 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for hound is 5 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /haʊnd/. Corpus data places it at rank #16,494 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 6 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 hound, with forms such as "hhound", "honud", and "houdn". 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, "hun", "HUD", "hour", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English hound, from Old English hund, from Proto-West Germanic *hund, from Proto-Germanic *hundaz, from pre-Germanic *ḱuntós (compare Latvian sùnt-ene (“big dog”), enlargement of Proto-Indo-European *ḱwṓ (“dog”). Doublet of canine. In 14th-centu… 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 hound, spelled H-O-U-N-D, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1A dog, particularly a breed with a good sense of smell developed for hunting other animals.
- 2Any canine animal.
- 3Someone who seeks something.
- 4A male who constantly seeks the company of desirable women.
- 5A despicable person.
- 6A houndfish.
Etymology
From Middle English hound, from Old English hund, from Proto-West Germanic *hund, from Proto-Germanic *hundaz, from pre-Germanic *ḱuntós (compare Latvian sùnt-ene (“big dog”), enlargement of Proto-Indo-European *ḱwṓ (“dog”). Doublet of canine. In 14th-century England, hound was the general word for all domestic canines, and dog referred to a subtype resembling the modern mastiff and bulldog. By the 16th century, dog had become the general word, and hound had begun to refer only to breeds used for hunting.
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: hhound,honud,houdn,houndd,hounnd,huond,ohund
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for hound
Misspelling Variants of "hound"
Frequency rank: #16,494 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter H in our English index: