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pea

/piː/noun

pea is spelled P-E-A: 3 letters and one syllable. It appears 3.5 times per million words in written English, the 14,106th most frequent word form (wordfreq, 2021 data). As a noun, pea means “Any of certain plants of the family Fabaceae: Pisum sativum and others” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). The plural of pea is peas; Wiktionary also lists pease (archaic).

How many letters and syllables are in pea?

Letters3: P-E-A
Syllables1 (from its American pronunciation)
In writing3.5 times per million words; the 14,106th most frequent word form
Wrong spellings searchednone measured in search
Pairs people search
Sounds like
Same letters

Sources: letters and syllables from the English Wiktionary's hyphenation or pronunciation and the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary; written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media); Bing searches in the United States: the average month from September 2025 to August 2026 (Microsoft Advertising keyword data through DataForSEO, read September 30, 2026); rhymes and same-letter words are computed by PlainSpell from its own word list.

How common is pea?

Pea appears 3.5 times per million words in written English, the 14,106th most frequent word form in the list.

Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).

How do you pronounce pea?

  • /piː/

Pea has one syllable (counted from its American pronunciation in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary).

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: En-us-pea.ogg, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).

Words people confuse with pea

Word pairs people search, with the monthly searches for “a vs b” (G: Google, B: Bing, United States).

pea vs pee0 B

Sounds like: pee (Wiktionary's homophone list; some hold only in some accents).

Also written: peak, pease.

Sources: Google and Bing searches (September 2025 to August 2026, through DataForSEO); English Wiktionary (homophones, alternative spellings).

What rhymes with pea?

No other word on PlainSpell ends in the same sounds as pea.

Spelled with the same letters in another order: ape.

Computed by PlainSpell from the pronunciations in the English Wiktionary (dump of September 2, 2026): a rhyme shares every sound from the last stressed vowel to the end; ordered by written frequency (wordfreq 3.1).

Forms of pea

  • peas plural

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

What does pea mean?

The meanings the English Wiktionary records, quoted as written there (source below).

noun

  1. 1

    Any of certain plants of the family Fabaceae: Pisum sativum and others.

  2. 2

    A plant, Pisum sativum, member of the legume (Fabaceae) family.

  3. 3

    The edible seed of Pisum sativum.

  4. 4

    The edible seed of various other pea plants.

  5. 5

    Any of several varieties of bean.

    peas and rice

  6. 6

    Money.

    Man's making bare peas.

  7. 7

    A ball travelling at high velocity.

  8. 8

    USAny of the small numbered balls used in a pea shake game.

  9. 9

    Ellipsis of green pea galaxy.

  10. 10

    archaicrarea peafowl

  11. 11

    Alternative form of peak.

noun

as PEA
  1. 1

    Initialism of palmitoylethanolamide.

  2. 2

    Initialism of pulseless electrical activity.

  3. 3

    Initialism of preliminary ecological appraisal.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

Pea in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese

LanguageWords
Frenchpois (plant), petit pois (edible seed)
GermanErbse (plant)
Portugueseervilha (plant)
Spanishguisante, ervilla, arveja, chícharo (plant), alverja (edible seed), bola rápida (in baseball)

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Translations are Wiktionary's, by sense; a linked word has its own PlainSpell page.

Where does pea come from?

Back-formation from pease, an original singular reinterpreted as a plural. Further from Middle English pese (“a pea”), from Old English pise, from Latin pisa, pisum, from Ancient Greek πίσον (píson).

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

What to look up after pea