meager

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for meager is 6 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈmiɡɚ/. Corpus data places it at rank #27,213 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 4 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 7 documented wrong-spelling variants for meager, with forms such as "emager", "maeger", and "meaegr". 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, "meer", "meter", "merge", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English megre, from Anglo-Norman megre, Old French maigre, from Latin macer, from Proto-Indo-European *mh₂ḱrós. Akin, through the Indo-European root, to Old English mæġer (“meager, lean”), West Frisian meager (“meager”), Dutch mager (“meager”), … 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 meager, spelled M-E-A-G-E-R, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.