meadow
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
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6 characters
Language
English
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "meadow", 6-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 "meadow" 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 "meadow" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
meadow is aEnglishnoun. It means: A field or pasture; a piece of land either intentionally cultivated with grass or (especially) naturally covered with grass, especially one that is intended to be mown for hay or to be grazed. Pronounced /ˈmɛd.əʊ̯/. Often confused with meow and mellow.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | meadow |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /ˈmɛd.əʊ̯/ |
| Letters | 6 |
| Frequency rank | #13,017 |
| Misspellings tracked | 8 |
| Confusable pairs | 6 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for meadow is 6 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈmɛd.əʊ̯/. Corpus data places it at rank #13,017 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 2 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 8 documented wrong-spelling variants for meadow, with forms such as "emadow", "maedow", and "meaddow". 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 6 confusable-pair relationships, "meow", "mellow", "Meadows", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English medowe, medewe, medwe (also mede > Modern English mead), from Old English mǣdwe, inflected form of mǣd (see mead), from Proto-Germanic *mēdwō, from Proto-Indo-European *h₂met- (“to mow, reap”), enlargement of *h₂meh₁-. Related to mead (“… 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 meadow, spelled M-E-A-D-O-W, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1A field or pasture; a piece of land either intentionally cultivated with grass or (especially) naturally covered with grass, especially one that is intended to be mown for hay or to be grazed.
- 2Low land covered with coarse grass or rank herbage near rivers and in marshy places by the sea.
Etymology
From Middle English medowe, medewe, medwe (also mede > Modern English mead), from Old English mǣdwe, inflected form of mǣd (see mead), from Proto-Germanic *mēdwō, from Proto-Indo-European *h₂met- (“to mow, reap”), enlargement of *h₂meh₁-. Related to mead (“meadow”) and to math (“mowed result or area”). More at mow. Related to the following: West Frisian miede, dialectal Dutch made, dialectal German Matte (“mountain pasture”); also Welsh medi, Latin metō, Ancient Greek ἄμητος (ámētos, “reaping”).
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: emadow,maedow,meaddow,meadoww,meadwo,meaodw,medaow,mmeadow
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for meadow
Misspelling Variants of "meadow"
Frequency rank: #13,017 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter M in our English index: