planet
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
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6 characters
Language
English
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "planet", 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 "planet" 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 "planet" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
planet is aEnglishnoun. It means: Each of the seven major bodies which move relative to the fixed stars in the night sky—the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. Pronounced /ˈplænɪt/. It ranks #2,123 in English word frequency. Often confused with plat and plans.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | planet |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /ˈplænɪt/ |
| Letters | 6 |
| Frequency rank | #2,123 |
| Misspellings tracked | 9 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for planet is 6 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈplænɪt/. Corpus data places it at rank #2,123 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 4 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 planet, with forms such as "lpanet", "palnet", and "plaent". 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, "plat", "plans", "plant", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English planete, from Old French planete, from Latin planeta, planetes, from Ancient Greek πλανήτης (planḗtēs, “wanderer”) (itself an ellipsis of ἀστέρες πλανῆται (astéres planêtai, “wandering stars”)), from Ancient Greek πλανάω (planáō, “wander… 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 planet, spelled P-L-A-N-E-T, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1Each of the seven major bodies which move relative to the fixed stars in the night sky—the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn.
- 2Any body that orbits the Sun, including the asteroids (as minor planets) and sometimes the moons of those bodies (as satellite planets)
- 3A body which is massive enough to be in hydrostatic equilibrium (generally resulting in being an ellipsoid) but not enough to attain nuclear fusion and, in IAU usage, which directly orbits a star (or multiple star) and dominates the region of its orbit; specifically, in the case of the Solar system, the eight major bodies of Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.
- 4construed with the or this: The Earth.
Etymology
From Middle English planete, from Old French planete, from Latin planeta, planetes, from Ancient Greek πλανήτης (planḗtēs, “wanderer”) (itself an ellipsis of ἀστέρες πλανῆται (astéres planêtai, “wandering stars”)), from Ancient Greek πλανάω (planáō, “wander about, stray”), of unknown origin. Cognate with Latin pālor (“wander about, stray”), Old Norse flana (“to rush about”), and Norwegian flanta (“to wander about”). More at flaunt. So called because they have apparent motion, unlike the "fixed" stars. Originally including also the moon and sun but not the Earth; modern scientific sense of "world that orbits a star" is from 1630s in English. The Greek word is an enlarged form of πλάνης (plánēs, “who wanders around, wanderer”), also "wandering star, planet", in medicine "unstable temperature."
Synonyms
Antonyms
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: lpanet,palnet,plaent,planett,plannet,plante,pllanet,plnaet,pplanet
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for planet
Misspelling Variants of "planet"
Frequency rank: #2,123 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter P in our English index: