measure

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for measure is 7 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈmɛʒ.ə/. Corpus data places it at rank #2,261 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 19 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 9 documented wrong-spelling variants for measure, with forms such as "emasure", "maesure", and "measrue". 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 5 confusable-pair relationships, "measures", "measured", "mature", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English mesure, from Old French mesure, from Latin mēnsūra (“a measure”), mētior (“to measure”, supine stem in mēns-) + -tūra. Largely displaced native Old English metan ("to measure" whence modern mete) and ġemet (“a measure”). See also -ure. 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 measure, spelled M-E-A-S-U-R-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.