leap-year
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
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English
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "leap-year", 9-letters, with pronunciation in International Phonetic Alphabet notation, etymology traced through Germanic and Romance roots where applicable, common misspelling variants catalogued from Wiktionary, and usage frequency ranked against an open word-frequency list covering the top 100,000 English words. PlainSpell covers English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and German spelling with confusable-pair detection that highlights visually and phonetically similar words. This entry for "leap-year" 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 "leap-year" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
leap year is aEnglishnoun. It means: A year in the Julian or Gregorian calendar with an intercalary day added to February (in the Gregorian calendar, February 29), used to adjust for the extra hours of the solar year; a 366-day year. Pronounced /ˈliːp ˌjɪə/.
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Browse all word comparisons →| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | leap year |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /ˈliːp ˌjɪə/ |
| Letters | 9 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for leap year is 9 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈliːp ˌjɪə/. It sits outside the most-frequent rank tiers, which is often why uncommon words generate more spelling variants per reader.Wiktionary records 2 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
No misspelling variants are generated for leap year in our index, suggesting the orthography follows predictable English patterns.It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, which tends to mean the word is visually distinctive enough to stand on its own.
Etymologically, the entry records: PIE word *yóh₁r̥ From Late Middle English lepe-yer, lep-yer (“year with 366 days, leap year”), from lep, lepe (“act of jumping, jump, leap”) (from Old English hlīep, hlȳp, probably ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *klewp- (“to spring; to stumble”)) + ye… 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 leap year, spelled L-E-A-P- -Y-E-A-R, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1A year in the Julian or Gregorian calendar with an intercalary day added to February (in the Gregorian calendar, February 29), used to adjust for the extra hours of the solar year; a 366-day year.
- 2Any other year featuring intercalation, such as a year in a lunisolar calendar with 13 months instead of 12, used to maintain its alignment with the seasons of the solar year.
Etymology
PIE word *yóh₁r̥ From Late Middle English lepe-yer, lep-yer (“year with 366 days, leap year”), from lep, lepe (“act of jumping, jump, leap”) (from Old English hlīep, hlȳp, probably ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *klewp- (“to spring; to stumble”)) + yer (“calendrical unit based on a complete revolution of the Earth around the Sun, year”) (from Old English ġēar, ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *yóh₁r̥ (“year”)). The English term is analysable as leap (noun) + year, and possibly relates to the phenomenon that any fixed date of a 365-day calendar advances one weekday each year but every date of a 366-day year after February 29 (often seen as the leap day) advances by two weekdays instead. For example, Christmas (December 25) fell on a Saturday in 2004, a Sunday in 2005, a Monday in 2006, and a Tuesday in 2007 but then “leapt” over Wednesday to fall on a Thursday in 2008 which was a leap year. Compare also Old English mōnan hlȳp (“moon’s leap”) and Medieval Latin saltus lūnae (literally “leap moon”), an additional day added every 19 years (a Metonic cycle) to bring the lunar and solar calendars into alignment. Cognates * Old Norse hlaup-ár (“leap year”)
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