police
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 "police", 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 "police" 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 "police" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
police is aEnglishnoun. It means: A constituted body of officers representing the civil authority of government, empowered to maintain public order and safety, enforce the law, and prevent, detect, and investigate crime. Pronounced /pəˈliːs/. It ranks #471 in English word frequency. Often confused with price and polio.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | police |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /pəˈliːs/ |
| Letters | 6 |
| Frequency rank | #471 |
| Misspellings tracked | 8 |
| Confusable pairs | 14 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for police is 6 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /pəˈliːs/. Corpus data places it at rank #471 in overall English word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language.Wiktionary records 10 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 8 documented wrong-spelling variants for police, with forms such as "oplice", "ploice", and "poilce". 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 14 confusable-pair relationships, "price", "polio", "ponce", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle French police, from Latin polītīa (“state, government”), from Ancient Greek πολιτεία (politeía). Doublet of policy, polis (“police”), and polity. 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 police, spelled P-O-L-I-C-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1A constituted body of officers representing the civil authority of government, empowered to maintain public order and safety, enforce the law, and prevent, detect, and investigate crime.
- 2A constituted body of officers representing the civil authority of government, empowered to maintain public order and safety, enforce the law, and prevent, detect, and investigate crime.
- 3A constituted body of officers representing the civil authority of government, empowered to maintain public order and safety, enforce the law, and prevent, detect, and investigate crime.
- 4A constituted body of officers representing the civil authority of government, empowered to maintain public order and safety, enforce the law, and prevent, detect, and investigate crime.
- 5The staff of such a department or agency, particularly its officers; (regional, chiefly US, Caribbean, Jamaica, Scotland, countable) an individual police officer.
- 6People who try to enforce norms or standards as if granted authority similar to the police.
- 7Cleanup of a military facility, as a formal duty.
- 8Synonym of administration, the regulation of a community or society.
- 9Alternative form of policy.
- 10Alternative form of polity, civilization, a regulated community.
Etymology
From Middle French police, from Latin polītīa (“state, government”), from Ancient Greek πολιτεία (politeía). Doublet of policy, polis (“police”), and polity.
Synonyms
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: oplice,ploice,poilce,polcie,policce,poliec,pollice,ppolice
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for police
Misspelling Variants of "police"
Frequency rank: #471 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter P in our English index: