passive voice
"passive-voice" is a 12-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“passive voice” is uncommon English (outside the top frequency list), classed as a noun. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency English
- 13
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - The form of a transitive verb in which its subject receives the action.
Corpus desk
Index EN-passive-voice · passive voice · English
passive voice · unranked · 0 variants · 0 confusables
- FREQ-UNRANKED Unranked
- LEN-MEGA 13 letters
- VOW-6 6 vowels
- CONFUS-0 No pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-THIN "P" thin
- PHOTO-UNK Peer pending
Read with this headword: Spelling guide for this pattern
Desk codes from Wiktionary headword shape, FrequencyWords rank tier, confusable-pair count, generated misspelling depth, letter-cohort book size, and photo-finish peer. Not a difficulty grade.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | passive voice |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| Letters | 13 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Long-tail rank of “passive voice” in English
Rare enough to double-check
passive voice is uncommon English outside the top frequency list, classed as anoun. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. 2 senses are on record.
Our edit-distance generator produced no likely misspellings for passive voice, a sign its spelling follows regular English conventions. 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.
This entry's etymology isn't recorded, so spelling patterns must be inferred from the word's phoneme-to-grapheme mapping rather than from a documented borrowing chain. The correct English form is passive voice, spelled P-A-S-S-I-V-E- -V-O-I-C-E.
Definition
- 1The form of a transitive verb in which its subject receives the action.
- 2Any writing which obscures the identity of the perpetrator of an action, regardless of whether the sentence uses the passive form of a verb.
Recorded use
Wiktionary examplesThese source excerpts show how passive voice appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
The passive voice is sometimes criticized for de-emphasizing the actor.
Many languages, including English, use auxiliary verbs in constructing the passive voice.
Antonyms
This word in other languages
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.