Ishtar
"ishtar" is a 6-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“Ishtar” is uncommon English (frequency #51,186 among 17,902 “I” headwords), classed as a proper noun. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- #51,186
- frequency rank, English
- 17,902
- “I” headwords
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed May 6, 2026) - A goddess of fertility, love, sex, and war. In the Babylonian pantheon, she was the divine personification of the planet Venus; the Assyrian and Babylonian counterpart to the Sumerian Inanna and to...
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | Ishtar |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Proper noun |
| Letters | 6 |
| Frequency rank | #51,186 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Where “Ishtar” sits in English frequency
Rare enough to double-check
Ishtar is uncommon English at frequency #51,186 among 17,902 “I” headwords, classed as aproper noun. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. Gloss: "A goddess of fertility, love, sex, and war. In the Babylonian pantheon, she was the divine personification of the planet Venus; the Assyrian and Babylonian counterpart to the Sumerian Inanna and to...".
We couldn't generate a plausible misspelling set for Ishtar, since its letter sequence doesn't invite the usual edit-distance slips. It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, since nothing in our dataset looks or sounds close enough to cause mix-ups.
Etymologically, the entry records: Learned borrowing from Akkadian 𒀭𒈹 (Ištar). Doublet of Astarte and Ashtoreth. Despite modern folk-etymology, not related in any way to English Easter. The correct English form is Ishtar, spelled I-S-H-T-A-R.
Definition
- 1A goddess of fertility, love, sex, and war. In the Babylonian pantheon, she was the divine personification of the planet Venus; the Assyrian and Babylonian counterpart to the Sumerian Inanna and to the northwest-Semitic goddess Astarte.
Etymology
Learned borrowing from Akkadian 𒀭𒈹 (Ištar). Doublet of Astarte and Ashtoreth. Despite modern folk-etymology, not related in any way to English Easter.
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.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Using “Ishtar”
The practical upshot for anyone who landed here from a spell-check.
- The one correct English spelling is I-S-H-T-A-R - every other letter order is a misspelling in standard orthography.
- Browse more English words and confusable pairs in the same reference. English words
Other uncommon English words near this rank
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.