hydrogen
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
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8 characters
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English
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "hydrogen", 8-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 "hydrogen" 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 "hydrogen" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
hydrogen is aEnglishnoun. It means: The lightest chemical element (symbol H), with an atomic number of 1 and atomic weight of 1.008. Pronounced /ˈhaɪdɹəd͡ʒ(ə)n/. It ranks #7,349 in English word frequency.
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Browse all word comparisons →| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | hydrogen |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /ˈhaɪdɹəd͡ʒ(ə)n/ |
| Letters | 8 |
| Frequency rank | #7,349 |
| Misspellings tracked | 13 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for hydrogen is 8 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈhaɪdɹəd͡ʒ(ə)n/. Corpus data places it at rank #7,349 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 5 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 13 documented wrong-spelling variants for hydrogen, with forms such as "hdyrogen", "hhydrogen", and "hyddrogen". 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 is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, which tends to mean the word is visually distinctive enough to stand on its own.
Etymologically, the entry records: Borrowed from French hydrogène (“hydrogen”), coined by the French chemists Louis-Bernard Guyton de Morveau (1737–1816) and Antoine Lavoisier (1743–1794) from hydro- (prefix meaning ‘water’) + -gène (suffix denoting a producer of something), from the fact th… 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 hydrogen, spelled H-Y-D-R-O-G-E-N, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1The lightest chemical element (symbol H), with an atomic number of 1 and atomic weight of 1.008.
- 2The lightest chemical element (symbol H), with an atomic number of 1 and atomic weight of 1.008.
- 3Molecular hydrogen (sense 1; symbol H₂), a colourless, odourless and flammable gas at room temperature.
- 4Molecular hydrogen (sense 1; symbol H₂), a colourless, odourless and flammable gas at room temperature.
- 5Synonym of protium (“the lightest and most common isotope of hydrogen (sense 1; symbol H, ¹H, or 11H), as contrasted with deuterium and tritium”).
Etymology
Borrowed from French hydrogène (“hydrogen”), coined by the French chemists Louis-Bernard Guyton de Morveau (1737–1816) and Antoine Lavoisier (1743–1794) from hydro- (prefix meaning ‘water’) + -gène (suffix denoting a producer of something), from the fact that water is produced as a compound when hydrogen is oxidized. * The prefix hydro- is borrowed from Ancient Greek ῠ̔δρο- (hŭdro-), from ῡ̆̔́δωρ (hū̆́dōr, “water”), ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *wed- (“water”). * The suffix -gène is borrowed from Ancient Greek -γενής (-genḗs, suffix meaning ‘born in a certain condition or place’), from γένος (génos, “descendant, offspring; race; etc.”) (ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *ǵenh₁- (“to beget, produce; to give birth”)) + -ης (-ēs, suffix forming some third-declension adjectives). By surface analysis, hydro- (prefix meaning ‘water’) + -gen (suffix denoting a producer of something).
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: hdyrogen,hhydrogen,hyddrogen,hydorgen,hydrgoen,hydroegn,hydrogenn,hydroggen,hydrogne,hydrrogen,hyrdogen,hyydrogen,yhdrogen
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for hydrogen
Misspelling Variants of "hydrogen"
Frequency rank: #7,349 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter H in our English index: