hunt
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
Letters
4 characters
Language
English
word origin
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "hunt", 4-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 "hunt" 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 "hunt" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
hunt is aEnglishverb. It means: To find or search for an animal in the wild with the intention of killing the animal for its meat or for sport. Pronounced /hʌnt/. It ranks #3,065 in English word frequency. Often confused with hut and Hur.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | hunt |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Verb |
| IPA | /hʌnt/ |
| Letters | 4 |
| Frequency rank | #3,065 |
| Misspellings tracked | 6 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for hunt is 4 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /hʌnt/. Corpus data places it at rank #3,065 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 8 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 6 documented wrong-spelling variants for hunt, with forms such as "hhunt", "hnut", and "hunnt". 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, "hut", "Hur", "Hus", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English hunten, from Old English huntian (“to hunt”), from Proto-West Germanic *huntōn (“to hunt, capture”), possibly from Proto-Indo-European *ḱent- (“to catch, seize”). Related to Old High German hunda (“booty”), Gothic 𐌷𐌿𐌽𐌸𐍃 (hunþs, “bod… 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 hunt, spelled H-U-N-T, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1To find or search for an animal in the wild with the intention of killing the animal for its meat or for sport.
- 2To try to find something; search (for).
- 3To drive; to chase; with down, from, away, etc.
- 4To use or manage (dogs, horses, etc.) in hunting.
- 5To use or traverse in pursuit of game.
- 6To move or shift the order of (a bell) in a regular course of changes.
- 7To shift up and down in order regularly.
- 8To be in a state of instability of movement or forced oscillation, as a governor which has a large movement of the balls for small change of load, an arc-lamp clutch mechanism which moves rapidly up and down with variations of current, etc.; also, to seesaw, as a pair of alternators working in parallel.
Etymology
From Middle English hunten, from Old English huntian (“to hunt”), from Proto-West Germanic *huntōn (“to hunt, capture”), possibly from Proto-Indo-European *ḱent- (“to catch, seize”). Related to Old High German hunda (“booty”), Gothic 𐌷𐌿𐌽𐌸𐍃 (hunþs, “body of captives”), Old English hūþ (“plunder, booty, prey”), Old English hentan (“to catch, seize”). More at hent, hint. In some areas read as a collective form of hound by folk etymology.
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: hhunt,hnut,hunnt,huntt,hutn,uhnt
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for hunt
Misspelling Variants of "hunt"
Frequency rank: #3,065 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter H in our English index: