mean

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for mean is 4 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /miːn/. Corpus data places it at rank #274 in overall English word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language.Wiktionary records 11 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 4 documented wrong-spelling variants for mean, with forms such as "eman", "maen", and "meann". 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, "MN", "men", "met", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English menen (“to intend; remember; lament; comfort”), from Old English mǣnan (“to mean, complain”), Proto-West Germanic *mainijan, from Proto-Germanic *mainijaną (“to mean, think; complain”), from Proto-Indo-European *meyn- (“to think”), or pe… 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 mean, spelled M-E-A-N, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.