metastasis
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
Letters
10 characters
Language
English
word origin
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "metastasis", 10-letters, with pronunciation in International Phonetic Alphabet notation, etymology traced through Germanic and Romance roots where applicable, common misspelling variants catalogued from Wiktionary, and usage frequency ranked against an open word-frequency list covering the top 100,000 English words. PlainSpell covers English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and German spelling with confusable-pair detection that highlights visually and phonetically similar words. This entry for "metastasis" 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 "metastasis" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
metastasis is aEnglishnoun. It means: A change in nature, form, or quality. Pronounced /mɪˈtæstəsɪs/. Often confused with metastatic and metastases.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | metastasis |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /mɪˈtæstəsɪs/ |
| Letters | 10 |
| Frequency rank | #34,194 |
| Misspellings tracked | 15 |
| Confusable pairs | 2 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for metastasis is 10 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /mɪˈtæstəsɪs/. Corpus data places it at rank #34,194 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 generated misspelling index lists 15 likely wrong-spelling variants for metastasis, with forms such as "emtastasis", "meatstasis", and "metasatsis". Each variant is a distinct typo pattern an edit-distance generator flags, typically a doubled-consonant error, a silent-letter drop, or a vowel substitution.It also participates in 2 confusable-pair relationships, "metastatic", "metastases", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: Learned borrowing from Late Latin metastasis (“(rhetoric) rapid or sudden transition from one argument, point, or topic to another”), and from its etymons Koine Greek μετάστασις (metástasis, “(rhetoric) rapid or sudden transition from one argument, point, o… 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 metastasis, spelled M-E-T-A-S-T-A-S-I-S, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1A change in nature, form, or quality.
- 2The spread of something harmful to another location, such as the metastasis of a cancer.
- 3A sudden or rapid transition from one point, topic or argument to another, often to evade an uncomfortable subject or to redirect the discussion.
- 4The transference of a bodily function or disease to another part of the body, specifically the development of a secondary area of disease remote from the original site, as with some cancers.
Etymology
Learned borrowing from Late Latin metastasis (“(rhetoric) rapid or sudden transition from one argument, point, or topic to another”), and from its etymons Koine Greek μετάστασις (metástasis, “(rhetoric) rapid or sudden transition from one argument, point, or topic to another”) and Ancient Greek μετάστασις (metástasis, “change; removal; (medicine) movement of disease, pain, etc., from one part of the body to another”), from μετᾰ- (metă-, prefix denoting change in condition or position) (possibly ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *meth₂) + στᾰ́σῐς (stắsĭs, “condition, state; position”) (ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *steh₂- (“to stand (up)”)), modelled after μεθιστάναι (methistánai, “to change; to remove”). By surface analysis, meta- + stasis. In reference to the spread of cancer, a semantic loan from French métastase, whose use to refer to it was coined in 1829 by the French gynecologist Joseph Récamier (1774–1852). The plural form metastases is a learned borrowing from Late Latin metastases.
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: emtastasis,meatstasis,metasatsis,metasstasis,metastaiss,metastasiss,metastassi,metastassis,metastsais,metasttasis,metatsasis,metsatasis,mettastasis,mmetastasis,mteastasis
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for metastasis
Misspelling Variants of "metastasis"
Frequency rank: #34,194 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter M in our English index: