path
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
Letters
4 characters
Language
English
word origin
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "path", 4-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 "path" 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 "path" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
path is aEnglishnoun. It means: A trail for the use of, or worn by, pedestrians. Pronounced /pɑːθ/. It ranks #2,006 in English word frequency. Often confused with pt and put.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | path |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /pɑːθ/ |
| Letters | 4 |
| Frequency rank | #2,006 |
| Misspellings tracked | 6 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for path is 4 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /pɑːθ/. Corpus data places it at rank #2,006 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 9 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 path, with forms such as "apth", "paht", and "pathh". 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, "pt", "put", "pay", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English path, peth, from Old English pæþ (“path, track”), from Proto-West Germanic *paþ, from Proto-Germanic *paþaz (“path”). The Proto-Germanic term is possibly borrowed from Iranian, from Proto-Iranian *pántaHh, from Proto-Indo-Iranian *pántaH… 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 path, spelled P-A-T-H, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1A trail for the use of, or worn by, pedestrians.
- 2A course taken.
- 3A metaphorical course or route; progress.
- 4A method or direction of proceeding.
- 5A Pagan tradition, for example witchcraft, Wicca, druidism, Heathenry.
- 6A human-readable specification for a location within a hierarchical or tree-like structure, such as a file system or as part of a URL.
- 7A sequence of vertices from one vertex to another using the arcs (edges). A path does not visit the same vertex more than once (unless it is a closed path, where only the first and the last vertex are the same).
- 8A continuous map f from the unit interval I=[0,1] to a topological space X.
- 9A slot available for allocation to a railway train over a given route in between other trains.
Etymology
From Middle English path, peth, from Old English pæþ (“path, track”), from Proto-West Germanic *paþ, from Proto-Germanic *paþaz (“path”). The Proto-Germanic term is possibly borrowed from Iranian, from Proto-Iranian *pántaHh, from Proto-Indo-Iranian *pántaHs, from Proto-Indo-European *póntoh₁s, from the root *pent- (“to pass”), however this is disputed. Cognates Cognate with Saterland Frisian Paad, Pad (“path”), West Frisian paad (“path”), Dutch pad (“path”), German Pfad (“path”), German Low German Padd (“path”), Luxembourgish Pad (“path”). Indo-Iranian cognates could be Avestan 𐬞𐬀𐬧𐬙𐬃 (paṇtā̊, “way”), Old Persian 𐎱𐎰 (p-θ /paθi/)), Sanskrit पन्था (panthā, “path”). See also English find. Doublet of panth.
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: apth,paht,pathh,patth,ppath,ptah
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for path
Misspelling Variants of "path"
Frequency rank: #2,006 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter P in our English index: