luck
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 "luck", 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 "luck" 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 "luck" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
luck is aEnglishnoun. It means: Something that happens to someone by chance, a chance occurrence. Pronounced /lʌk/. It ranks #1,312 in English word frequency. Often confused with lux and lug.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | luck |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /lʌk/ |
| Letters | 4 |
| Frequency rank | #1,312 |
| Misspellings tracked | 6 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for luck is 4 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /lʌk/. Corpus data places it at rank #1,312 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 5 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 6 documented wrong-spelling variants for luck, with forms such as "lcuk", "lluck", and "lucck". 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, "lux", "lug", "luv", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English luk, lukke, related to Old Frisian luk (“luck”), West Frisian gelok (“luck”), Saterland Frisian Gluk (“luck”), Dutch geluk (“luck, happiness”), Low German luk (“luck”), German Glück (“luck, good fortune, happiness”), Danish lykke (“luck”… 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 luck, spelled L-U-C-K, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1Something that happens to someone by chance, a chance occurrence.
- 2Something that happens to someone by chance, a chance occurrence.
- 3A superstitious feeling that brings fortune or success.
- 4Success.
- 5The results of a random number generator.
Etymology
From Middle English luk, lukke, related to Old Frisian luk (“luck”), West Frisian gelok (“luck”), Saterland Frisian Gluk (“luck”), Dutch geluk (“luck, happiness”), Low German luk (“luck”), German Glück (“luck, good fortune, happiness”), Danish lykke (“luck”), Swedish lycka (“luck”), Icelandic lukka (“luck”). According to the OED, it may be related to lock. A loanword into English in the 15th century (probably as a gambling term) from Middle Dutch luc, a shortened form of gheluc (“good fortune”), whence Modern Dutch geluk. Middle Dutch luc, gheluc has parallels with Middle High German lücke, gelücke (Modern German Glück). The word occurs only from the 12th century, apparently first in Rhine Frankish. Perhaps from a Frankish *galukki. The word enters standard Middle High German during the 13th century, and spreads to English and Scandinavian in the Late Middle Ages. Its origin seems to have been regional or dialectal, and there were competing German words such as gevelle or schick, or the Latinate fortūne from Latin fortūna. Its etymology is unknown, although there are numerous proposals as to its derivations from a number of roots. Use as a verb in American English is late (1940s), but there was a Middle English verb lukken (“to chance, to happen by good fortune”) in the 15th century.
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: lcuk,lluck,lucck,luckk,lukc,ulck
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for luck
Misspelling Variants of "luck"
Frequency rank: #1,312 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter L in our English index: