hurt
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 "hurt", 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 "hurt" 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 "hurt" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
hurt is aEnglishverb. It means: To cause (a person or animal) physical pain and/or injury. Pronounced /hɜːt/. It ranks #1,224 in English word frequency. Often confused with hut and Hus.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | hurt |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Verb |
| IPA | /hɜːt/ |
| Letters | 4 |
| Frequency rank | #1,224 |
| Misspellings tracked | 6 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for hurt is 4 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /hɜːt/. Corpus data places it at rank #1,224 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 4 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 hurt, with forms such as "hhurt", "hrut", and "hurrt". 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", "Hus", "Huw", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English hurten, hirten, hertan (“to injure, scathe, knock together”), from Old Northern French hurter ("to ram into, strike, collide with"; > Modern French heurter), perhaps from Frankish *hūrt (“a battering ram”), cognate with Welsh hwrdd (“ram… 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 hurt, spelled H-U-R-T, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1To cause (a person or animal) physical pain and/or injury.
- 2To cause (somebody) emotional pain.
- 3To be painful.
- 4To damage, harm, impair, undermine, impede.
Etymology
From Middle English hurten, hirten, hertan (“to injure, scathe, knock together”), from Old Northern French hurter ("to ram into, strike, collide with"; > Modern French heurter), perhaps from Frankish *hūrt (“a battering ram”), cognate with Welsh hwrdd (“ram”) and Cornish hordh (“ram”). Compare Proto-Germanic *hrūtaną, *hreutaną (“to fall, beat”), from Proto-Indo-European *krew- (“to fall, beat, smash, strike, break”); however, the earliest instances of the verb in Middle English are as old as those found in Old French, which leads to the possibility that the Middle English word may instead be a reflex of an unrecorded Old English *hyrtan, which later merged with the Old French verb. Germanic cognates include Dutch horten (“to push against, strike”), Middle Low German hurten (“to run at, collide with”), Middle High German hurten (“to push, bump, attack, storm, invade”), Old Norse hrútr (“battering ram”). Alternate etymology traces Old Northern French hurter rather to Old Norse hrútr (“ram (male sheep)”), lengthened-grade variant of hjǫrtr (“stag”), from Proto-Germanic *herutuz, *herutaz (“hart, male deer”), which would relate it to English hart (“male deer”). See hart.
Synonyms
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: hhurt,hrut,hurrt,hurtt,hutr,uhrt
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for hurt
Misspelling Variants of "hurt"
Frequency rank: #1,224 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter H in our English index: