once-a-man-twice-a-child
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
Letters
24 characters
Language
English
word origin
Source
Wiktionary
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "once-a-man-twice-a-child", 24-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 "once-a-man-twice-a-child" 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 "once-a-man-twice-a-child" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
once a man, twice a child is aEnglishproverb. It means: A man is born as a child, grows to adulthood, and consequently enters old age, when he deteriorates and reverts to a childlike state. Pronounced /ˌwʌn(t)s‿ə ˈmæn ˌtwaɪs‿ə ˈt͡ʃaɪld/.
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See how once a man, twice a child compares against similar English words.
Browse all word comparisons →| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | once a man, twice a child |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Proverb |
| IPA | /ˌwʌn(t)s‿ə ˈmæn ˌtwaɪs‿ə ˈt͡ʃaɪld/ |
| Letters | 25 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for once a man, twice a child is 25 letters long, classified as aproverb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˌwʌn(t)s‿ə ˈmæn ˌtwaɪs‿ə ˈt͡ʃaɪld/. It sits outside the most-frequent rank tiers, which is often why uncommon words generate more spelling variants per reader.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "A man is born as a child, grows to adulthood, and consequently enters old age, when he deteriorates and reverts to a childlike state.".
No misspelling variants are generated for once a man, twice a child in our index, suggesting the orthography follows predictable English patterns.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.
No explicit etymology string is stored for this entry, so spelling patterns must be inferred from the word's phoneme-to-grapheme mapping rather than from a documented borrowing chain. For readers arriving here from a spelling check, the authoritative guidance is: the correct English form is once a man, twice a child, spelled O-N-C-E- -A- -M-A-N-,- -T-W-I-C-E- -A- -C-H-I-L-D, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1A man is born as a child, grows to adulthood, and consequently enters old age, when he deteriorates and reverts to a childlike state.
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter O in our English index: