pheromone
noun
pheromone is spelled P-H-E-R-O-M-O-N-E. The wrong spelling people search most is pheremone: about 60 Bing searches a month in the United States (September 2025 to August 2026), about 1 in 10 of all searches for the word. Pheromone is a noun meaning “A chemical secreted by an animal, especially an insect, that affects the development or behavior of other…”. The plural of pheromone is pheromones.
How many letters and syllables are in pheromone?
| Letters | 9: P-H-E-R-O-M-O-N-E |
|---|---|
| Syllables | 3 (from its American pronunciation) |
| In writing | about once in every 2 million words; the 41,154th most frequent word form |
| Wrong spellings searched | 1; the most searched, pheremone, about 60 Bing searches a month (all of them) |
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).
How do you spell pheromone?
Pheromone is spelled P-H-E-R-O-M-O-N-E. One wrong spelling is searched or written often enough to measure; together they are about 1 in 10 of the searches for pheromone in either form.
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). Wrong spellings are taken from Wiktionary entries tagged "misspelling" and its obsolete or nonstandard forms, Wikipedia's Lists of common misspellings and the codespell dictionary, then measured. The proofreader's marks show the change that corrects each one.
How common is pheromone?
Pheromone appears about once in every 2 million words in written English, the 41,154th 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 pheromone?
- US
Pheromone has 3 syllables (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: LL-Q1860_(eng)-Wodencafe-pheromone.wav, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).
Forms of pheromone
- pheromones plural
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
What does pheromone mean?
The meanings the English Wiktionary records, quoted as written there (source below).
noun
- 1
A chemical secreted by an animal, especially an insect, that affects the development or behavior of other members of the same species, functioning often as a means of attracting a member of the opposite sex.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
Pheromone in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese
In the sense chemical:
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 pheromone come from?
From φέρω (phérō, “I bring, bear, carry”) and hormone.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).