metronome

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for metronome is 9 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈmɛt.ɹəˌnoʊm/. Corpus data places it at rank #46,061 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "A device, containing an inverted pendulum, used to mark time by means of regular ticks at adjustable intervals; an electronic equivalent that emits flashes.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 13 documented wrong-spelling variants for metronome, with forms such as "emtronome", "mertonome", and "metornome". 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 is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, which tends to mean the word is visually distinctive enough to stand on its own.

Etymologically, the entry records: Coined in English from Ancient Greek μέτρον (métron, “measure”) + νόμος (nómos, “regulation, law”). 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 metronome, spelled M-E-T-R-O-N-O-M-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.