lane
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
Letters
4 characters
Language
English
word origin
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "lane", 4-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 "lane" 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 "lane" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
lane is aEnglishnoun. It means: A road, street, or similar thoroughfare. Pronounced /leɪn/. It ranks #2,630 in English word frequency. Often confused with le and LN.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | lane |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /leɪn/ |
| Letters | 4 |
| Frequency rank | #2,630 |
| Misspellings tracked | 5 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for lane is 4 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /leɪn/. Corpus data places it at rank #2,630 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 13 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 5 documented wrong-spelling variants for lane, with forms such as "alne", "laen", and "lanne". 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 20 confusable-pair relationships, "le", "LN", "law", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English lane, lone, from Old English lanu (“a lane, alley, avenue”), from Proto-West Germanic *lanu, from Proto-Germanic *lanō (“lane, passageway”). Cognate with Scots lone (“cattle-track, by-road”), West Frisian leane, loane (“a walkway, avenue… 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 lane, spelled L-A-N-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1A road, street, or similar thoroughfare.
- 2A narrow passageway between fences, walls, hedges or trees.
- 3A narrow road, as in the country.
- 4A lengthwise division of roadway intended for a single line of vehicles.
- 5A similar division of a racetrack to keep runners apart.
- 6A similar division of a swimming pool using lines of coloured floats to keep swimmers apart.
- 7Any of a number of parallel tracks or passages.
- 8A course designated for ships or aircraft.
- 9An elongated wooden strip of floor along which a bowling ball is rolled.
- 10An empty space in the tableau, formed by the removal of an entire row of cards.
- 11Any of the parallel slots in which values can be stored in a SIMD architecture.
- 12In MOBA (multiplayer online battle arena) games, a particular path on the map that may be traversed by enemy characters.
- 13The home stretch.
Etymology
From Middle English lane, lone, from Old English lanu (“a lane, alley, avenue”), from Proto-West Germanic *lanu, from Proto-Germanic *lanō (“lane, passageway”). Cognate with Scots lone (“cattle-track, by-road”), West Frisian leane, loane (“a walkway, avenue”), Dutch laan (“alley, avenue”), German Low German Lane, Laan (“lane”), Swedish lån (“covered walkway encircling a house”), Icelandic lön (“a row of houses”).
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: alne,laen,lanne,llane,lnae
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for lane
Misspelling Variants of "lane"
Frequency rank: #2,630 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter L in our English index: