library
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
Letters
7 characters
Language
English
word origin
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "library", 7-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 "library" 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 "library" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
library is aEnglishnoun. It means: An institution which holds books and/or other forms of media for use by the public or qualified people often lending them out, as well as providing various other services for its users. Pronounced /ˈlaɪ.bɹi/. It ranks #1,459 in English word frequency. Often confused with literary and libra.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | library |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /ˈlaɪ.bɹi/ |
| Letters | 7 |
| Frequency rank | #1,459 |
| Misspellings tracked | 11 |
| Confusable pairs | 2 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for library is 7 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈlaɪ.bɹi/. Corpus data places it at rank #1,459 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 8 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 11 documented wrong-spelling variants for library, with forms such as "ilbrary", "lbirary", and "libarry". 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 2 confusable-pair relationships, "literary", "libra", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English librarie, from Anglo-Norman librarie, from Old French librairie, from Latin librarium (“bookcase, chest for books”), from librarius (“concerning books”), from liber (“the inner bark of trees; paper, parchment, book”), probably derived fr… 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 library, spelled L-I-B-R-A-R-Y, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1An institution which holds books and/or other forms of media for use by the public or qualified people often lending them out, as well as providing various other services for its users.
- 2Any institution that lends out its goods for use by the public or a community.
- 3A collection of books or other forms of stored information.
- 4An equivalent collection of analogous information in a non-printed form, e.g. record library.
- 5A room dedicated to storing books.
- 6A collection of software routines that provide functionality to be incorporated into or used by a computer program.
- 7A collection of DNA material from a single organism or relative to a single disease.
- 8The deck or draw pile.
Etymology
From Middle English librarie, from Anglo-Norman librarie, from Old French librairie, from Latin librarium (“bookcase, chest for books”), from librarius (“concerning books”), from liber (“the inner bark of trees; paper, parchment, book”), probably derived from a Proto-Indo-European base *leub(ʰ)- (“to strip, to peel”). Displaced native Middle English bochous, bokhus (literally “book house”), from Old English bōchūs (compare bookhouse). Romance cognates often mean “bookshop” instead: French librairie, Italian libreria, Spanish librería, Romanian librărie and Portuguese livraria. This is a relatively recent innovation (16th century in French), which ended up displacing the earlier sense.
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: ilbrary,lbirary,libarry,libbrary,librarry,libraryy,librayr,librrary,librray,lirbary,llibrary
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for library
Misspelling Variants of "library"
Frequency rank: #1,459 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter L in our English index: