korea
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
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5 characters
Language
English
word origin
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "korea", 5-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 "korea" 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 "korea" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
Korea is aEnglishname. It means: A geographic region consisting of two countries in East Asia, commonly known as South Korea and North Korea; formerly a single country. Pronounced /kəˈɹi.ə/. It ranks #2,258 in English word frequency. Often confused with KORS and Kota.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | Korea |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Name |
| IPA | /kəˈɹi.ə/ |
| Letters | 5 |
| Frequency rank | #2,258 |
| Misspellings tracked | 6 |
| Confusable pairs | 14 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for Korea is 5 letters long, classified as aname, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /kəˈɹi.ə/. Corpus data places it at rank #2,258 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 Korea, with forms such as "kkorea", "koera", and "korae". 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 14 confusable-pair relationships, "KORS", "Kota", "Kyra", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: First attested as Core in the 1598 English translation of the 1596 Itinerario of Jan Huyghen van Linschoten, from the original Dutch Core, itself from Portuguese according to van Linschoten's account. The spelling Corea was more common in Early Modern Engli… 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 Korea, spelled K-O-R-E-A, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1A geographic region consisting of two countries in East Asia, commonly known as South Korea and North Korea; formerly a single country.
- 2A geographic region consisting of two countries in East Asia, commonly known as South Korea and North Korea; formerly a single country.
- 3A geographic region consisting of two countries in East Asia, commonly known as South Korea and North Korea; formerly a single country.
- 4A peninsula in East Asia, containing the countries of North Korea and South Korea; in full, Korean Peninsula.
Etymology
First attested as Core in the 1598 English translation of the 1596 Itinerario of Jan Huyghen van Linschoten, from the original Dutch Core, itself from Portuguese according to van Linschoten's account. The spelling Corea was more common in Early Modern English, likely through Core + -ia. Ultimately a sixteenth-century borrowing by Europeans from some variety of Chinese. Compare Mandarin 高麗 /高丽 (Gāolí) but especially Hokkien 高麗 /高丽 (Ko-lê), which matches the Dutch-Portuguese vowels exactly. These are Chinese pronunciations of Sino-Korean 고려(高麗) (Goryeo), Korea's official name between 918 and 1394 and still used by Chinese people to refer to the country for centuries thereafter; this itself being a shortening of 高句麗 (“Goguryeo”), an ancient Korean kingdom in the first millennium. Doublet of Goryeo, directly from Korean. Some Korean authors claim an Arabic intermediary instead, but this is impossible because the actual medieval Arabic word for Korea was a variant of السيلى (al-sīlā, see also Silla).
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: kkorea,koera,korae,korrea,kroea,okrea
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for Korea
Misspelling Variants of "Korea"
Frequency rank: #2,258 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter K in our English index: