milk
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
Letters
4 characters
Language
English
word origin
Source
Wiktionary
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "milk", 4-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 "milk" 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 "milk" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
milk is aEnglishnoun. It means: A white liquid produced by the mammary glands of female mammals to nourish their young. From certain animals, especially cows, it is also called dairy milk and is a common food for humans as a beve... Pronounced /mɪlk/. It ranks #2,223 in English word frequency. Often confused with ML and MK.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | milk |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /mɪlk/ |
| Letters | 4 |
| Frequency rank | #2,223 |
| Misspellings tracked | 6 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for milk is 4 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /mɪlk/. Corpus data places it at rank #2,223 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 6 documented wrong-spelling variants for milk, with forms such as "imlk", "mikl", and "milkk". 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, "ML", "MK", "mix", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English milk, mylk, melk, mulc, from Old English meolc, meoluc (“milk”), from Proto-West Germanic *meluk (“milk”), from Proto-Germanic *meluks (“milk”), from Proto-Indo-European *h₂melǵ- (“milk, to milk”). Cognates Cognate with West Frisian molk… 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 milk, spelled M-I-L-K, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1A white liquid produced by the mammary glands of female mammals to nourish their young. From certain animals, especially cows, it is also called dairy milk and is a common food for humans as a beverage or used to produce various dairy products such as butter, cheese, and yogurt.
- 2A white (or whitish) liquid obtained from a vegetable source such as almonds, coconuts, oats, rice, or soy beans.
- 3An individual serving of milk.
- 4An individual portion of milk, such as found in a creamer, for tea and coffee.
- 5The ripe, undischarged spat of an oyster.
- 6Semen.
Etymology
From Middle English milk, mylk, melk, mulc, from Old English meolc, meoluc (“milk”), from Proto-West Germanic *meluk (“milk”), from Proto-Germanic *meluks (“milk”), from Proto-Indo-European *h₂melǵ- (“milk, to milk”). Cognates Cognate with West Frisian molke (“milk”), Dutch melk (“milk”), Dutch Low Saxon melk (“milk”), German Milch (“milk”), German Low German Melk (“milk”), Yiddish מילך (milkh, “milk”), Danish mælk (“milk”), Faroese and Icelandic mjólk (“milk”), Norn *mjølk (“milk”), Norwegian Bokmål melk, mjølk (“milk”), Norwegian Nynorsk mjølk (“milk”), Swedish mjölk (“milk”), Gothic 𐌼𐌹𐌻𐌿𐌺𐍃 (miluks, “milk”), Greek αμέλγω (amélgo, “to milk”), Albanian mjel (“to milk”), Latvian malks, Lithuanian malkas, Belarusian малако́ (malakó, “milk”), Bulgarian мля́ко (mljáko, “milk”), Czech mléko, Macedonian мле́ко (mléko, “milk”), Polish mleko (“milk”), Russian and Ukrainian молоко́ (molokó, “milk”), Serbo-Croatian mlijéko (“milk”), Slovak mlieko (“milk”), Slovene mlẹ́ko (“milk”), Welsh blith, Tocharian A malke.
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: imlk,mikl,milkk,millk,mlik,mmilk
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for milk
Misspelling Variants of "milk"
Frequency rank: #2,223 in English
Frequently Asked Questions
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter M in our English index: