mickle
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
Letters
6 characters
Language
English
word origin
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "mickle", 6-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 "mickle" 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 "mickle" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
mickle is anEnglishadj. It means: (Very) great or large. Pronounced /ˈmɪk(ə)l/.
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Browse all word comparisons →| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | mickle |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Adj |
| IPA | /ˈmɪk(ə)l/ |
| Letters | 6 |
| Frequency rank | #74,317 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for mickle is 6 letters long, classified as anadj, 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.".
No frequent misspelling variants are recorded for mickle in our index, suggesting the orthography either follows predictable English patterns or the word is uncommon enough that typo corpora lack signal.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: 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… 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 mickle, spelled M-I-C-K-L-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
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”.
Frequency rank: #74,317 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter M in our English index: