mickle
/ˈmɪk(ə)l/
"mickle" is a 6-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“mickle” is an uncommon English word, ranked #74,317 in English word frequency and used as an adjective.
- #74,317
- frequency rank, English
- 6
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed May 6, 2026) - (Very) great or large.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | mickle |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Adjective |
| IPA | /ˈmɪk(ə)l/ |
| Letters | 6 |
| Frequency rank | #74,317 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Where “mickle” sits in English frequency
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for mickle is 6 letters long, classified as an adjective, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈmɪk(ə)l/. Corpus data places it at rank #74,317 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it. The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "(Very) great or large.".
mickle doesn't appear in our generated misspelling index, since its letter pattern doesn't lend itself to common typo substitutions. It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, a sign it's visually distinctive enough not to be mixed up with another word.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English mickle, michel, mikel, mochel, muchel, mukel (“much; many; large, tall; great”), from Old English miċel, myċel (“big, large; great; much”), from Proto-Germanic *mikilaz (“great, large; many, much”), from Proto-Indo-European *méǵh₂s (“big… The correct English form is mickle, spelled M-I-C-K-L-E.
Definition
- 1(Very) great or large.
Etymology
From Middle English mickle, michel, mikel, mochel, muchel, mukel (“much; many; large, tall; great”), from Old English miċel, myċel (“big, large; great; much”), from Proto-Germanic *mikilaz (“great, large; many, much”), from Proto-Indo-European *méǵh₂s (“big, great”). The word is cognate with Faroese mikil (“large, great, much”), Icelandic mikill (“large in quantity or number; much; great”), Middle High German michel (“large, much”). Doublet of much and muckle. For the adverb and noun forms, compare Middle English muchel (“extensively, greatly, much”, adverb) and Middle English muchel (“large amount”, noun). The noun sense “a small amount” was due to the proverb many a little makes a mickle being incorrectly rendered as many a mickle makes a muckle, leading to mickle being thought to mean “a small quantity” and muckle to mean “a large quantity”, even though muckle is a variant of mickle and both mean “a large quantity”.
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA); frequency ordering uses the FrequencyWords open word-frequency list (2018 English corpus, MIT). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Using “mickle”
The practical upshot for anyone who landed here from a spell-check.
- The one correct English spelling is M-I-C-K-L-E - every other letter order is a misspelling in standard orthography.
- Say it as /ˈmɪk(ə)l/ (IPA); tap the speaker on the pronunciation badge to hear it where audio exists.
- Browse more English words and confusable pairs in the same reference. English words
Data Source
Wiktionary (via kaikki.org), licensed under CC BY-SA & GFDL. Word ordering uses an open word-frequency list; misspelling variants are generated by edit-distance from the correct headword.