person
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
Letters
6 characters
Language
English
word origin
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "person", 6-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 "person" 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 "person" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
person is aEnglishnoun. It means: An individual who has been granted personhood; usually a human being. Pronounced /ˈpɜː.sən/. It ranks #257 in English word frequency. Often confused with peso and prison.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | person |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /ˈpɜː.sən/ |
| Letters | 6 |
| Frequency rank | #257 |
| Misspellings tracked | 9 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for person is 6 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈpɜː.sən/. Corpus data places it at rank #257 in overall English word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language.Wiktionary records 13 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 9 documented wrong-spelling variants for person, with forms such as "eprson", "perosn", and "perrson". 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, "peso", "prison", "poison", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English persoun, personne et al., from Anglo-Norman parsone, persoun et al. (Old French persone (“human being”), French personne), and its source Latin persōna (“mask used by actor; role, part, character”), perhaps a loanword from Etruscan 𐌘𐌄�… 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 person, spelled P-E-R-S-O-N, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1An individual who has been granted personhood; usually a human being.
- 2An individual who has been granted personhood; usually a human being.
- 3An individual who has been granted personhood; usually a human being.
- 4An individual who has been granted personhood; usually a human being.
- 5An individual who has been granted personhood; usually a human being.
- 6An individual who has been granted personhood; usually a human being.
- 7An individual who has been granted personhood; usually a human being.
- 8The physical body of a being seen as distinct from the mind, character, etc.
- 9Any individual or formal organization with standing before the courts.
- 10The human genitalia; specifically, the penis.
- 11A linguistic category used to distinguish between the speaker of an utterance and those to whom or about whom they are speaking. See grammatical person.
- 12A shoot or bud of a plant; a polyp or zooid of the compound Hydrozoa, Anthozoa, etc.; also, an individual, in the narrowest sense, among the higher animals.
- 13A soulmate; someone, especially a romantic partner, with whom one is exceptionally compatible and connected.
Etymology
From Middle English persoun, personne et al., from Anglo-Norman parsone, persoun et al. (Old French persone (“human being”), French personne), and its source Latin persōna (“mask used by actor; role, part, character”), perhaps a loanword from Etruscan 𐌘𐌄𐌓𐌔𐌖 (φersu, “mask”). In this sense, displaced native man, which came to mean primarily "adult male" in Middle English; see Old English mann. Doublet of parson and persona.
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: eprson,perosn,perrson,persno,personn,persson,pesron,pperson,preson
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for person
Misspelling Variants of "person"
Frequency rank: #257 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter P in our English index: