house
/haʊs/
"house" is a 5-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“house” has 6 generated spelling variants in the English index at frequency #186. The variants make it a useful spelling check.
- #186
- frequency rank, English
- 23,837
- “H” headwords
- 6
- tracked misspellings
- 20
- confusable pairs
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed May 6, 2026) - A structure built or serving as an abode of human beings.
Corpus desk
Index EN-house · house · English
house · rank #186 · 6 variants · 20 confusables
- FREQ-CORE #186
- LEN-MID 5 letters
- VOW-3 3 vowels
- CONFUS-HIGH 20 pairs
- VAR-MID 6 variants
- BOOK-DENSE 23,837
- PHOTO-FINISH give
Nearest frequency peer: give (-1 rank slots)
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.
Frequency neighbourhood for “house”
Lower corpus rank = more everyday usage (inverted bar length for readability)
- I've
I've
99,818 corpus weight
- thing
thing
99,817 corpus weight
- give
give
99,816 corpus weight
- house
house
99,815 corpus weight
- place
place
99,814 corpus weight
- school
school
99,813 corpus weight
What this shows Bars show where “house” sits against the nearest ranked English headwords in the FrequencyWords band, not a reprint of letter-browse containment.
Visual similarity to commonly confused words
How many letter changes separate each confused pair (Levenshtein distance, normalized).
Source: PlainSpell confusable corpus (Wiktionary, CC BY-SA).
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | house |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /haʊs/ |
| Letters | 5 |
| Frequency rank | #186 |
| Misspellings tracked | 6 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Where “house” sits in English frequency
A misspelling magnet
The generator records 6 spelling variants around house (IPA /haʊs/), anoun. Corpus frequency is #186 among 23,837 “H” headwords. Wiktionary lists 25 senses, so context still picks the gloss.
Our generated misspelling index lists 6 likely wrong-spelling variants for house, with forms such as "hhouse", "hosue", and "houes". Every one of these variants traces to a single-character edit -- an added or dropped letter, a swapped consonant, or a vowel swap -- the kind of slip a spell-checker is built to catch. It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "hue", "hse", "Hus", and more, since the words sound or look close enough that writers reach for the wrong one mid-sentence.
Etymologically, the entry records: Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *(s)kewH-der.? Proto-Germanic *hūsą Proto-West Germanic *hūs Old English hūs Middle English hous English house From Middle English hous, hus, from Old English hūs (“dwelling, shelter, house”), from Proto-West Germanic *hūs… The correct English form is house, spelled H-O-U-S-E.
Definition
- 1A structure built or serving as an abode of human beings.
- 2A structure built or serving as an abode of human beings.
- 3A container; a thing which houses another.
- 4Size and quality of residential accommodations; housing.
- 5A building intended to contain a single household, as opposed to an apartment or condominium or building containing these.
- 6The people who live in a house; a household.
- 7A building used for something other than a residence (typically with qualifying word).
- 8A building used for something other than a residence (typically with qualifying word).
- 9A building used for something other than a residence (typically with qualifying word).
- 10A building used for something other than a residence (typically with qualifying word).
- 11The audience for a live theatrical or similar performance.
- 12A building where a deliberative assembly meets; whence the assembly itself, particularly a component of a legislature.
- 13A dynasty; a family with its ancestors and descendants, especially a royal or noble one.
- 14A place of rest or repose.
- 15A grouping of schoolchildren for the purposes of competition in sports and other activities.
- 16An animal's shelter or den, or the shell of an animal such as a snail, used for protection.
- 17One of the twelve divisions of an astrological chart.
- 18The fourth Lenormand card.
- 19A square on a chessboard, regarded as the proper place of a piece.
- 20The four concentric circles where points are scored on the ice.
- 21Lotto; bingo.
- 22A children's game in which the players pretend to be members of a household.
- 23A small stand of trees in a swamp.
- 24A set of cells in a sudoku puzzle which must contain each digit exactly once, such as a row, column, or 3×3 box.
- 25The end zone.
Recorded use
Wiktionary examplesThese source excerpts show how house appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
This is my house and my family's ancestral home.
The big houses, and there are a good many of them, lie for the most part in what may be called by courtesy the valleys. You catch a glimpse of them sometimes at a little distance from the [railway] line, which seems to have shown some ingenuity in avoiding them,[…].
Etymology
Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *(s)kewH-der.? Proto-Germanic *hūsą Proto-West Germanic *hūs Old English hūs Middle English hous English house From Middle English hous, hus, from Old English hūs (“dwelling, shelter, house”), from Proto-West Germanic *hūs, from Proto-Germanic *hūsą (“house”), possibly from Proto-Indo-European *(s)kews-, from *(s)kewH- (“to cover, hide”). More at hose. Eclipsed non-native Middle English mees, meson, measoun (“house”), borrowed from Anglo-Norman mes, mies, meis, maisun (“house”). The uncommon plural form housen is from Middle English husen, housen. (The Old English nominative plural was simply hūs.) Cognates Cognate with Scots hoose, oos (“house”), Yola heouse, houze, howze (“house”), North Frisian hüs (“house”), Saterland Frisian Huus, Húus (“house”), West Frisian hûs (“house”), Alemannic German hous, hus, husch, hüs, hüüsch (“house”), Bavarian, Cimbrian, Mòcheno haus (“house”), Central Franconian Haus, Hous, Huus (“home”), Dutch huis (“house”), Dutch Low Saxon hoes, huus (“house”), German Haus, Hauß (“house”), German Low German Huus (“house”), Limburgish hoes, Huus (“house”), Luxembourgish Haus (“house”), Vilamovian haojs, haus, hoüz (“house”), Yiddish הויז (hoyz, “house”), Danish, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk hus (“house”), Elfdalian aus (“house”), Faroese, Icelandic hús (“house”), Swedish hus, hws (“house”), Crimean Gothic hus (“house”); also Cornish kudha (“to conceal, hide”), Welsh cuddio (“to hide”), Latin cutis (“human skin; hide, leather”), Ancient Greek κεύθω (keúthō, “to cover, hide”), Tocharian A kāc (“hide, skin”), Sanskrit स्कुनाति (skunāti, “to cover”).
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as:
- hhouse
- hosue
- houes
- housse
- huose
- ohuse
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
How far each generated variant is from the correct spelling of house - measured in single-character edits (insert, delete, or substitute a letter). Larger bars are easier to catch; one-edit slips are the sneakiest.
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA); frequency ordering uses the FrequencyWords open word-frequency list (2018 English corpus, MIT). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.
PlainSpell is rendered directly from structured Wiktionary extracts and open word-frequency lists, no number is typed in by an editor. See our editorial standards & corrections policy, the methodology behind these numbers, or report a data error. Data current as of May 6, 2026. Primary sources: Wiktionary (via kaikki.org) and FrequencyWords.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Similar English words by spelling shape
Same letter count and similar misspelling depth for "house", not the corpus desk frequency band.
Same letter count
Frequency-ranked English headwords with 5 letters (nearest by frequency rank).
Similar misspelling depth
Headwords with a similar count of attested misspellings (6 here; floor ≥5).
Data Source
Wiktionary (via kaikki.org), licensed under CC BY-SA & GFDL. Word ordering uses an open word-frequency list; misspelling variants are generated by edit-distance from the correct headword.