knight
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
Letters
6 characters
Language
English
word origin
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "knight", 6-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 "knight" 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 "knight" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
knight is aEnglishnoun. It means: A young servant or follower; a trained military attendant in service of a lord. Pronounced /naɪt/. It ranks #4,461 in English word frequency. Often confused with knit and knights.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | knight |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /naɪt/ |
| Letters | 6 |
| Frequency rank | #4,461 |
| Misspellings tracked | 10 |
| Confusable pairs | 5 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for knight is 6 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /naɪt/. Corpus data places it at rank #4,461 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 11 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 10 documented wrong-spelling variants for knight, with forms such as "kinght", "kknight", and "kngiht". 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 5 confusable-pair relationships, "knit", "knights", "knighted", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English knight, knyght, kniht, from Old English cniht (“boy; servant, knight”), from Proto-West Germanic *kneht. 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 knight, spelled K-N-I-G-H-T, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1A young servant or follower; a trained military attendant in service of a lord.
- 2A minor nobleman with an honourable military rank who had served as a page and squire.
- 3An armored and mounted warrior of the Middle Ages.
- 4A person obliged to provide knight service in exchange for maintenance of an estate held in knight's fee.
- 5A person on whom a knighthood has been conferred by a monarch.
- 6A brave, chivalrous and honorable man devoted to a noble cause or love interest.
- 7A chess piece, often in the shape of a horse's head, that is moved two squares in one direction and one at right angles to that direction in a single move, leaping over any intervening pieces.
- 8A playing card bearing the figure of a knight; the knave or jack.
- 9Any of various nymphalid butterflies of the genus Ypthima.
- 10Any mushroom belonging to genus Tricholoma.
- 11A species of nymphalid butterfly, Lebadea martha, found in tropical and subtropical Asia.
Etymology
From Middle English knight, knyght, kniht, from Old English cniht (“boy; servant, knight”), from Proto-West Germanic *kneht.
Synonyms
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: kinght,kknight,kngiht,knigght,knighht,knightt,knigth,knihgt,knnight,nkight
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for knight
Misspelling Variants of "knight"
Frequency rank: #4,461 in English
Frequently Asked Questions
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter K in our English index: