leg
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "leg", 3-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 "leg" 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 "leg" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
leg is aEnglishnoun. It means: A limb or appendage that an animal uses for support or locomotion on land. Pronounced /lɛɡ/. It ranks #2,215 in English word frequency. Often confused with li and Lt.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | leg |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /lɛɡ/ |
| Letters | 3 |
| Frequency rank | #2,215 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for leg is 3 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /lɛɡ/. Corpus data places it at rank #2,215 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 27 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
No frequent misspelling variants are recorded for leg 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, "li", "Lt", "lo", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English leg, legge, from Old Norse leggr (“leg, calf, bone of the arm or leg, hollow tube, stalk”), from Proto-Germanic *lagjaz, *lagwijaz (“leg, thigh”) (see it for more). Cognate with Scots leg (“leg”), Icelandic leggur (“leg, limb”), Norwegia… 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 leg, spelled L-E-G, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1A limb or appendage that an animal uses for support or locomotion on land.
- 2In humans, the lower limb extending from the groin to the ankle.
- 3The portion of the lower limb of a human that extends from the knee to the ankle.
- 4A part of garment, such as a pair of trousers/pants, that covers a leg.
- 5A rod-like protrusion from an inanimate object, such as a piece of furniture, supporting it from underneath.
- 6Something that supports.
- 7A stage of a journey, race etc.
- 8A distance that a sailing vessel does without changing the sails from one side to the other.
- 9One side of a multiple-sided (often triangular) course in a sailing race.
- 10A single game or match played in a tournament or other sporting contest.
- 11One of the two sides of a right triangle that is not the hypotenuse.
- 12One of the two equal sides of an isosceles triangle.
- 13One of the branches of a hyperbola or other curve which extend outward indefinitely.
- 14The ability of something to persist or succeed over a long period of time.
- 15A disreputable sporting character; a blackleg.
- 16An extension of a steam boiler downward, in the form of a narrow space between vertical plates, sometimes nearly surrounding the furnace and ash pit, and serving to support the boiler; called also water leg.
- 17In a grain elevator, the case containing the lower part of the belt which carries the buckets.
- 18Denotes the half of the field on the same side as the batsman's legs; the left side for a right-handed batsman.
- 19A branch or lateral circuit connecting an instrument with the main line.
- 20A branch circuit; one phase of a polyphase system.
- 21An underlying instrument of a derivatives strategy.
- 22An army soldier assigned to a paratrooper unit who has not yet been qualified as a paratrooper.
- 23A gesture of submission; a bow or curtsey. Chiefly in phrase make a leg.
- 24A column, as a unit of length of text as laid out.
- 25Synonym of leg up (“forming a step for a person's feet with one's hands”).
- 26An individual bet in a parlay (a series of bets where the stake and winnings are cumulatively carried forward).
- 27Synonym of blackleg (“a gambling cheat”).
Etymology
From Middle English leg, legge, from Old Norse leggr (“leg, calf, bone of the arm or leg, hollow tube, stalk”), from Proto-Germanic *lagjaz, *lagwijaz (“leg, thigh”) (see it for more). Cognate with Scots leg (“leg”), Icelandic leggur (“leg, limb”), Norwegian Bokmål legg (“leg”), Norwegian Nynorsk legg (“leg”), Swedish lägg (“leg, shank, shaft”), Danish læg (“leg”), Lombardic lagi (“thigh, shank, leg”), Latin lacertus (“limb, arm”), Persian لنگ (leng). Upon borrowing, mostly displaced the native Old English term sċanca (Modern English shank).
This word in other languages
Frequency rank: #2,215 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter L in our English index: