office
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
Letters
6 characters
Language
English
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "office", 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 "office" 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 "office" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
office is aEnglishnoun. It means: A ceremonial duty or service, particularly Pronounced /ˈɒf.ɪs/. It ranks #389 in English word frequency. Often confused with offing and officer.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | office |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /ˈɒf.ɪs/ |
| Letters | 6 |
| Frequency rank | #389 |
| Misspellings tracked | 6 |
| Confusable pairs | 7 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for office is 6 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈɒf.ɪs/. Corpus data places it at rank #389 in overall English word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language.Wiktionary records 32 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 office, with forms such as "fofice", "offcie", and "officce". 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 7 confusable-pair relationships, "offing", "officer", "offices", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English office, from Old French office, from Latin officium (“personal, official, or moral duty; official position; function; ceremony, esp. last rites”), contracted from opificium (“construction: the act of building or the thing built”), from o… 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 office, spelled O-F-F-I-C-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1A ceremonial duty or service, particularly
- 2A ceremonial duty or service
- 3A ceremonial duty or service
- 4A ceremonial duty or service
- 5A ceremonial duty or service
- 6A ceremonial duty or service
- 7A ceremonial duty or service
- 8A ceremonial duty or service
- 9A position of responsibility.
- 10Official position, particularly high employment within government; tenure in such a position.
- 11A duty, particularly owing to one's position or station; a charge, trust, or role; (obsolete, rare) moral duty.
- 12Function: anything typically done by or expected of something.
- 13A service, a kindness.
- 14Inside information.
- 15A room, set of rooms, or building used for non-manual work, particularly
- 16A room, set of rooms, or building used for non-manual work
- 17A room, set of rooms, or building used for non-manual work
- 18A room, set of rooms, or building used for non-manual work
- 19The staff of such places.
- 20The administrative departments housed in such places, particularly
- 21The administrative departments housed in such places
- 22The administrative departments housed in such places
- 23The administrative departments housed in such places
- 24The parts of a house or estate devoted to manual work and storage, as the kitchen, scullery, laundry, stables, etc., particularly (euphemistic, dated) a house or estate's facilities for urination and defecation: outhouses or lavatories.
- 25Clipping of inquest of office
- 26A piece of land used for hunting; the area of land overseen by a gamekeeper.
- 27A hangout: a place where one is normally found.
- 28A plane's cockpit, particularly an observer's cockpit.
- 29A collection of business software typically including a word processor and spreadsheet and slideshow programs.
- 30An official or group of officials; (figuratively) a personification of officeholders.
- 31A bodily function, (particularly) urination and defecation; an act of urination or defecation.
- 32The performance of a duty; an instance of performing a duty.
Etymology
From Middle English office, from Old French office, from Latin officium (“personal, official, or moral duty; official position; function; ceremony, esp. last rites”), contracted from opificium (“construction: the act of building or the thing built”), from opifex (“doer of work, craftsman”) + -ium (“-y”, forming actions), from op- (“work”) + -i- (connective) + -fex (combining form of faciō (“to do, to make”)). The computing sense is a genericization of various proprietary program suites, such as Microsoft Office.
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: fofice,offcie,officce,offiec,ofice,ofifce
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for office
Misspelling Variants of "office"
Frequency rank: #389 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter O in our English index: