patch
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
Letters
5 characters
Language
English
word origin
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "patch", 5-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 "patch" 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 "patch" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
patch is aEnglishnoun. It means: A piece of cloth, or other suitable material, sewed or otherwise fixed upon a garment to repair or strengthen it, especially upon an old garment to cover a hole. Pronounced /pæt͡ʃ/. It ranks #5,149 in English word frequency. Often confused with path and pats.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | patch |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /pæt͡ʃ/ |
| Letters | 5 |
| Frequency rank | #5,149 |
| Misspellings tracked | 8 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for patch is 5 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /pæt͡ʃ/. Corpus data places it at rank #5,149 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 18 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 8 documented wrong-spelling variants for patch, with forms such as "aptch", "pacth", and "patcch". 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 20 confusable-pair relationships, "path", "pats", "pate", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English patche, of uncertain origin. Perhaps an alteration of earlier Middle English placche (“patch, spot, piece of cloth”), from Old English *plæċċ, *pleċċ (“a spot, mark, patch”), from Proto-West Germanic *plakkju, from Proto-Germanic *plakjō… 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 patch, spelled P-A-T-C-H, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1A piece of cloth, or other suitable material, sewed or otherwise fixed upon a garment to repair or strengthen it, especially upon an old garment to cover a hole.
- 2A small piece of anything used to repair damage or a breach; as, a patch on a kettle, a roof, etc.
- 3A piece of any size, used to repair something for a temporary period only, or that it is temporary because it is not meant to last long or will be removed as soon as a proper repair can be made, which will happen in the near future.
- 4A small, usually contrasting but always somehow different or distinct, part of something else (location, time, size)
- 5A small area, a small plot of land or piece of ground.
- 6A local region of professional responsibility.
- 7A small piece of black silk stuck on the face or neck to heighten beauty by contrast, worn by ladies in the 17th and 18th centuries; an imitation beauty mark.
- 8A piece of material used to cover a wound.
- 9An adhesive piece of material, impregnated with a drug, which is worn on the skin, the drug being slowly absorbed over a period of time.
- 10A cover worn over a damaged eye, an eyepatch.
- 11A block on the muzzle of a gun, to do away with the effect of dispart, in sighting.
- 12A piece of data intended to modify a computer file by replacing a part of it.
- 13A small piece of material that is manually passed through a gun barrel to clean it.
- 14A piece of greased cloth or leather used as wrapping for a rifle ball, to make it fit the bore.
- 15A cable connecting two pieces of electrical equipment.
- 16A sound setting for a musical synthesizer (originally selected by means of a patch cable).
- 17An overlay used to obtain a stronger impression.
- 18A butterfly of the genus Chlosyne.
Etymology
From Middle English patche, of uncertain origin. Perhaps an alteration of earlier Middle English placche (“patch, spot, piece of cloth”), from Old English *plæċċ, *pleċċ (“a spot, mark, patch”), from Proto-West Germanic *plakkju, from Proto-Germanic *plakjō (“spot, stain”). For the loss of l compare pat from Middle English platten. Germanic cognates would then include Middle English plecke, dialectal English pleck (“plot of ground, patch”), West Frisian plak (“place, spot”), Low German Plakk, Plakke (“spot, piece, patch”), Dutch plek (“spot, place, stain, patch”), Dutch plak (“piece, slab”), Swedish plagg (“garment”), Faroese plagg (“cloth, rag”). Or, possibly a variant of Old French pieche, dialectal variant of piece (“piece”). Compare also Old Occitan petaç (“patch”).
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: aptch,pacth,patcch,patchh,pathc,pattch,ppatch,ptach
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for patch
Misspelling Variants of "patch"
Frequency rank: #5,149 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter P in our English index: