partition
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
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9 characters
Language
English
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "partition", 9-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 "partition" 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 "partition" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
partition is aEnglishnoun. It means: An action which divides a thing into parts, or separates one thing from another. Pronounced /pɑɹˈtɪ.ʃən/. Often confused with petition.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | partition |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /pɑɹˈtɪ.ʃən/ |
| Letters | 9 |
| Frequency rank | #11,758 |
| Misspellings tracked | 14 |
| Confusable pairs | 1 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for partition is 9 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /pɑɹˈtɪ.ʃən/. Corpus data places it at rank #11,758 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 13 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 14 documented wrong-spelling variants for partition, with forms such as "aprtition", "parittion", and "parrtition". 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 1 confusable-pair relationship, "petition", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: Recorded c.1430, "division into shares, distinction," from Middle English particioun, from Old French particion (modern partition), from Latin partitio, partitionem (“division, portion”), from partitus, the past participle of partire (“to split (up), part(i… 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 partition, spelled P-A-R-T-I-T-I-O-N, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1An action which divides a thing into parts, or separates one thing from another.
- 2A part of something that has been divided.
- 3An approach to division in which one asks what the size of each part is, rather than (as in quotition) how many parts there are.
- 4The division of a territory into two or more autonomous ones.
- 5A vertical structure that divides a room.
- 6That which divides or separates; that by which different things, or distinct parts of the same thing, are separated; boundary; dividing line or space.
- 7A part divided off by walls; an apartment; a compartment.
- 8The severance of common or undivided interests, particularly in real estate. It may be effected by consent of parties, or by compulsion of law.
- 9A section of a hard disk separately formatted.
- 10A division of a database or one of its constituting elements such as tables into separate independent parts.
- 11A division of a data stream, such as a messaging queue or topic (often representing a unit of parallelism, and of fault tolerance).
- 12A collection of non-empty, disjoint subsets of a set whose union is the set itself (i.e. all elements of the set are contained in exactly one of the subsets).
- 13A musical score.
Etymology
Recorded c.1430, "division into shares, distinction," from Middle English particioun, from Old French particion (modern partition), from Latin partitio, partitionem (“division, portion”), from partitus, the past participle of partire (“to split (up), part(ition)”).
Synonyms
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: aprtition,parittion,parrtition,partiiton,partision,partitino,partitionn,partitoin,partittion,parttiion,parttition,patrition,ppartition,pratition
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for partition
Misspelling Variants of "partition"
Frequency rank: #11,758 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter P in our English index: