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letter-of-marque

Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.

Letters

16 characters

Language

English

word origin

Source

Wiktionary

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Detailed reference entry for the English word "letter-of-marque", 16-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 "letter-of-marque" 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 "letter-of-marque" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.

letter of marque is aEnglishnoun. It means: An official commission from a government authorizing someone to seize the property or people of another nation; especially to attack merchant shipping of another nation.

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Key facts for letter of marque
PropertyValue
Headwordletter of marque
LanguageEnglish
Part of speechNoun
Letters16
Misspellings tracked0
Confusable pairs0
SourceWiktionary (kaikki.org)

Frequency rank visualization

letter of marque is not present in the top-100,000 ranked English corpus, typical for technical, archaic, or low-frequency vocabulary.

Source: FrequencyWords open word-frequency list

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for letter of marque is 16 letters long, classified as anoun. 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 letter of marque 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.

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 letter of marque, spelled L-E-T-T-E-R- -O-F- -M-A-R-Q-U-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.

Definition

  1. 1
    An official commission from a government authorizing someone to seize the property or people of another nation; especially to attack merchant shipping of another nation.
  2. 2
    A ship that has been armed for such a task.

This word in other languages

Frequently Asked Questions

How do you spell "letter of marque"?
"letter of marque" is spelled L-E-T-T-E-R- -O-F- -M-A-R-Q-U-E.
What does "letter of marque" mean?
As a noun, "letter of marque" means: An official commission from a government authorizing someone to seize the property or people of another nation; especially to attack merchant shipping of another nation.
What language does "letter of marque" come from?
"letter of marque" is a English word. PlainSpell covers definitions, pronunciations, and spelling data across English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and German.
Is PlainSpell free to use?
Yes, PlainSpell is a completely free word reference. You can look up definitions, pronunciations, confusable pairs, homophones, and spelling corrections across 5 languages without any sign-up or subscription.

Nearby English words

Other entries that begin with the letter L in our English index:

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Data Source: Wiktionary (via kaikki.org), licensed under CC BY-SA & GFDL. Word ordering uses an open word-frequency list; misspelling variants are generated by edit-distance from the correct headword.