merit
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
Letters
5 characters
Language
English
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "merit", 5-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 "merit" 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 "merit" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
merit is aEnglishnoun. It means: A claim to commendation or a reward. Pronounced /ˈmɛɹɪt/. It ranks #6,267 in English word frequency. Often confused with met and mit.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | merit |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /ˈmɛɹɪt/ |
| Letters | 5 |
| Frequency rank | #6,267 |
| Misspellings tracked | 7 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for merit is 5 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈmɛɹɪt/. Corpus data places it at rank #6,267 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 6 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 merit, with forms such as "emrit", "meirt", and "meritt". 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, "met", "mit", "MRI", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English merit, merite (“quality of person’s character or conduct deserving of reward or punishment; such reward or punishment; excellence, worthiness; benefit; right to be rewarded for spiritual service; retribution at doomsday; virtue through w… 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 merit, spelled M-E-R-I-T, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1A claim to commendation or a reward.
- 2A mark or token of approbation or to recognize excellence.
- 3Something deserving or worthy of positive recognition or reward.
- 4The sum of all the good deeds that a person does which determines the quality of the person's next state of existence and contributes to the person's growth towards enlightenment.
- 5Usually in the plural form the merits: the substantive rightness or wrongness of a legal argument, a lawsuit, etc., as opposed to technical matters such as the admissibility of evidence or points of legal procedure; (by extension) the overall good or bad quality, or rightness or wrongness, of some other thing.
- 6The quality or state of deserving retribution, whether reward or punishment.
Etymology
From Middle English merit, merite (“quality of person’s character or conduct deserving of reward or punishment; such reward or punishment; excellence, worthiness; benefit; right to be rewarded for spiritual service; retribution at doomsday; virtue through which Jesus Christ brings about salvation; virtue possessed by a holy person; power of a pagan deity”), from Anglo-Norman merit, merite, Old French merite (“moral worth, reward; merit”) (modern French mérite), from Latin meritum (“that which one deserves, deserts; benefit, reward, merit; service; kindness; importance, value, worth; blame, demerit, fault; grounds, reason”), neuter of meritus (“deserved, earned, obtained; due, proper, right; deserving, meritorious”), perfect passive participle of mereō (“to deserve, earn, obtain, merit; to earn a living”), from Proto-Indo-European *(s)mer- (“to allot, assign”). The English word is probably cognate with Ancient Greek μέρος (méros, “component, part; portion, share; destiny, fate, lot”) and cognate with Old Occitan merit.
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: emrit,meirt,meritt,merrit,merti,mmerit,mreit
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for merit
Misspelling Variants of "merit"
Frequency rank: #6,267 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter M in our English index: