nursery
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
Letters
7 characters
Language
English
word origin
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "nursery", 7-letters, with pronunciation in International Phonetic Alphabet notation, etymology traced through Germanic and Romance roots where applicable, common misspelling variants catalogued from Wiktionary, and usage frequency ranked against an open word-frequency list covering the top 100,000 English words. PlainSpell covers English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and German spelling with confusable-pair detection that highlights visually and phonetically similar words. This entry for "nursery" 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 "nursery" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
nursery is aEnglishnoun. It means: A place where nursing (“breastfeeding”) or the raising of children is carried on. Pronounced /ˈnɜːsəɹi/. It ranks #8,462 in English word frequency. Often confused with nurse.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | nursery |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /ˈnɜːsəɹi/ |
| Letters | 7 |
| Frequency rank | #8,462 |
| Misspellings tracked | 11 |
| Confusable pairs | 1 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for nursery is 7 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈnɜːsəɹi/. Corpus data places it at rank #8,462 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 11 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our generated misspelling index lists 11 likely wrong-spelling variants for nursery, with forms such as "nnursery", "nrusery", and "nuresry". Each variant is a distinct typo pattern an edit-distance generator flags, typically a doubled-consonant error, a silent-letter drop, or a vowel substitution.It also participates in 1 confusable-pair relationship, "nurse", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English noricerie, norserye (“children's nursery; state of being fostered or nursed; education, upbringing”) [and other forms], from Old French norricerie, nourricerie, from norrice, nourrice (modern French nourrice (“childminder, nanny; wet nur… 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 nursery, spelled N-U-R-S-E-R-Y, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1A place where nursing (“breastfeeding”) or the raising of children is carried on.
- 2A place where nursing (“breastfeeding”) or the raising of children is carried on.
- 3A place where nursing (“breastfeeding”) or the raising of children is carried on.
- 4A place where anything is fostered and growth promoted.
- 5A place where anything is fostered and growth promoted.
- 6A place where anything is fostered and growth promoted.
- 7A place where anything is fostered and growth promoted.
- 8Something which educates and nurtures.
- 9Ellipsis of nursery cannon (“a carom shot involving balls that are very close together”).
- 10Someone or something that is nursed; a nursling.
- 11The act of nursing or rearing.
Etymology
From Middle English noricerie, norserye (“children's nursery; state of being fostered or nursed; education, upbringing”) [and other forms], from Old French norricerie, nourricerie, from norrice, nourrice (modern French nourrice (“childminder, nanny; wet nurse”)) + -erie (suffix forming feminine nouns). Norrice and nourrice are derived from Late Latin nūtrīcia (“wet nurse”), from Latin nūtrīcius (“that nurses or suckles; nourishing”), from nūtriō (“to breastfeed, nurse, suckle”), possibly ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *(s)neh₂- (“to flow”). The English word may be analysed as nourice, nurse + -ery (suffix forming nouns meaning ‘place of’).
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: nnursery,nrusery,nuresry,nurrsery,nurserry,nurseryy,nurseyr,nursrey,nurssery,nusrery,unrsery
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for nursery
Misspelling Variants of "nursery"
Frequency rank: #8,462 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter N in our English index: