murder
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 "murder", 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 "murder" 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 "murder" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
murder is aEnglishnoun. It means: The crime of killing a person unlawfully, especially with predetermination. Pronounced /ˈmɜːdə(ɹ)/. It ranks #1,462 in English word frequency. Often confused with muster and Muriel.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | murder |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /ˈmɜːdə(ɹ)/ |
| Letters | 6 |
| Frequency rank | #1,462 |
| Misspellings tracked | 9 |
| Confusable pairs | 14 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for murder is 6 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈmɜːdə(ɹ)/. Corpus data places it at rank #1,462 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 7 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 9 documented wrong-spelling variants for murder, with forms such as "mmurder", "mruder", and "mudrer". 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 14 confusable-pair relationships, "muster", "Muriel", "murmur", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English murder, murdre, mourdre, alteration of earlier murthre (“murder”) (see murther), from Old English morþor (“secret slaying, unlawful killing”) and Old English myrþra (“murder, homicide”), both from Proto-West Germanic *morþr, from Proto-G… 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 murder, spelled M-U-R-D-E-R, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1The crime of killing a person unlawfully, especially with predetermination.
- 2The crime of killing a person unlawfully, especially with predetermination.
- 3The act of killing a person (or sometimes another being) unlawfully, especially with predetermination
- 4Something terrible to endure.
- 5A group of crows; the collective noun for crows.
- 6Something remarkable or impressive.
- 7a murderer
Etymology
From Middle English murder, murdre, mourdre, alteration of earlier murthre (“murder”) (see murther), from Old English morþor (“secret slaying, unlawful killing”) and Old English myrþra (“murder, homicide”), both from Proto-West Germanic *morþr, from Proto-Germanic *murþrą (“death, killing, murder”), from Proto-Indo-European *mr̥tro- (“killing”), from Proto-Indo-European *mer-, *mor-, *mr̥- (“to die”). Akin to Gothic 𐌼𐌰𐌿𐍂𐌸𐍂 (maurþr, “murder”), Old High German mord (“murder”), Old Norse morð (“murder”), Old English myrþrian (“to murder”) and morþ. The -d- in the Middle English form may have been influenced in part by Anglo-Norman murdre, from Old French murdre, from Medieval Latin murdrum (whence the English doublet of murdrum), from Frankish *morþr, *murþr (“murder”), from the same Germanic root, though this may also have been wholly the result of internal development (compare burden, from burthen). (crows): Attested at least since 1475.
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: mmurder,mruder,mudrer,murdder,murderr,murdre,muredr,murrder,umrder
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for murder
Misspelling Variants of "murder"
Frequency rank: #1,462 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter M in our English index: