murrain
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "murrain", 7-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 "murrain" 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 "murrain" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
murrain is aEnglishnoun. It means: Infectious disease; pestilence, plague; (countable) sometimes used in curses such as a murrain on someone: an outbreak of such a disease; a plague. Pronounced /ˈmʌɹ(ɪ)n/.
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See how murrain compares against similar English words.
Browse all word comparisons →| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | murrain |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /ˈmʌɹ(ɪ)n/ |
| Letters | 7 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for murrain is 7 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈmʌɹ(ɪ)n/. It sits outside the most-frequent rank tiers, which is often why uncommon words generate more spelling variants per reader.Wiktionary records 7 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
No frequent misspelling variants are recorded for murrain 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: The noun is derived from Late Middle English morein, morine, moreyn (“(widespread) death; widespread sickness, plague; fatal disease; carnage; carrion”), from Anglo-Norman morine, mourine, moreyn (“death; widespread sickness, plague; carrion; cattle disease… 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 murrain, spelled M-U-R-R-A-I-N, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1Infectious disease; pestilence, plague; (countable) sometimes used in curses such as a murrain on someone: an outbreak of such a disease; a plague.
- 2A widespread affliction, calamity, or destructive influx, especially when seen as divine retribution; a plague.
- 3Any of several highly infectious diseases of cattle or other livestock, such as anthrax, babesiosis, or rinderpest; or a particular epizootic thereof; also, an infectious disease affecting other animals, such as poultry.
- 4An infectious disease affecting plants.
- 5A poor-quality green-salted animal hide.
- 6Death, especially from an infectious disease.
- 7Rotting flesh, especially of an animal which has died from a disease; carrion.
Etymology
The noun is derived from Late Middle English morein, morine, moreyn (“(widespread) death; widespread sickness, plague; fatal disease; carnage; carrion”), from Anglo-Norman morine, mourine, moreyn (“death; widespread sickness, plague; carrion; cattle disease”), Middle French morine, and Old French morine, mourine, murine (“widespread sickness, plague; animal which has died from a disease”), from Late Latin morina (“plague”), probably from Latin morior (“to die; to decay, wither”). The adjective and adverb are derived from the noun. Cognates * Italian morìa (“plague”) * Latin morticīnus (“that has died naturally, dead; (relational) carrion”) (Medieval Latin morticinium) * Occitan moria (“death; plague”) * Old French morie (“death”) mourie (“flesh of animals that have died of disease”) (Middle French murie) * Portuguese morrinha (“cattle plague”) * Spanish morriña (“cattle plague”)
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter M in our English index: