pay rise

noun

"pay-rise" is a 7-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.

The verdict

“pay rise” is uncommon English (outside the top frequency list), classed as a noun. The kind of spelling people second-guess.

Unranked
below top-frequency English
8
letters

According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - An increase in salary or wages.

Corpus desk

Index EN-pay-rise · pay rise · English

pay rise · unranked · 0 variants · 0 confusables

  • FREQ-UNRANKED Unranked
  • LEN-LONG 8 letters
  • VOW-4 4 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.

Key facts for pay rise
PropertyValue
Headwordpay rise
LanguageEnglish
Part of speechNoun
Letters8
Misspellings tracked0
Confusable pairs0
SourceWiktionary (kaikki.org)

Long-tail rank of “pay rise” in English

pay riseranks outside the top 100,000 English headwords, in the long tail of specialist, archaic, or seldom-used vocabulary, exactly the territory where a reader stops mid-sentence to double-check spelling.

Beyond rank #100,000. Source: FrequencyWords open word-frequency list.

Rare enough to double-check

pay rise is uncommon English outside the top frequency list, classed as anoun. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. Gloss: "An increase in salary or wages.".

Our edit-distance generator produced no likely misspellings for pay rise, a sign its spelling follows regular English conventions. This entry stands alone in our confusable 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. The correct English form is pay rise, spelled P-A-Y- -R-I-S-E.

Definition

  1. 1
    An increase in salary or wages.

Recorded use

Wiktionary example

These source excerpts show how pay rise appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.

  1. Whelan called the offer "risible", describing it as a "land grab for all the terms and conditions we have negotiating over the years". He demanded a no-strings pay offer that recognises the "significant cost of living increases" since the last pay rise in 2019.

Synonyms

raisepay raise

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.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do you spell "pay rise"?
"pay rise" is spelled P-A-Y- -R-I-S-E.
What does "pay rise" mean?
As a noun, "pay rise" means: An increase in salary or wages.
What language does "pay rise" come from?
"pay rise" is a English word. PlainSpell's reference spans five languages -- English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and German -- with definitions, pronunciations, and spelling data for each.
Is PlainSpell free to use?
Yes, PlainSpell is a completely free word reference. You can look up definitions, pronunciations, confusable pairs, homophones, and spelling corrections across 5 languages without any sign-up or subscription.

Source: Wiktionary (via kaikki.org) Structured Wiktionary extract

Source: FrequencyWords open word-frequency list