l
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
Letters
1 characters
Language
English
word origin
Source
Wiktionary
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "l", 1-letter, 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 "l" 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 "l" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
l is aEnglishcharacter. It means: The twelfth letter of the English alphabet, called el and written in the Latin script. Pronounced /ɛl/. It ranks #676 in English word frequency. Often confused with LA and le.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | l |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Character |
| IPA | /ɛl/ |
| Letters | 1 |
| Frequency rank | #676 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for l is 1 letters long, classified as acharacter, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ɛl/. Corpus data places it at rank #676 in overall English word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "The twelfth letter of the English alphabet, called el and written in the Latin script.".
No frequent misspelling variants are recorded for l in our index, suggesting the orthography either follows predictable English patterns or the word is uncommon enough that typo corpora lack signal.It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "LA", "le", "li", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
No explicit etymology string is stored for this entry, so spelling patterns must be inferred from the word's phoneme-to-grapheme mapping rather than from a documented borrowing chain. For readers arriving here from a spelling check, the authoritative guidance is: the correct English form is l, spelled L, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1The twelfth letter of the English alphabet, called el and written in the Latin script.
Frequency rank: #676 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter L in our English index: