premise
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
Letters
7 characters
Language
English
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "premise", 7-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 "premise" 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 "premise" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
premise is aEnglishnoun. It means: A proposition antecedently supposed or proved; something previously stated or assumed as the basis of further argument; a condition; a supposition. Pronounced /ˈpɹɛm.ɪs/. It ranks #9,384 in English word frequency. Often confused with promise and premium.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | premise |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /ˈpɹɛm.ɪs/ |
| Letters | 7 |
| Frequency rank | #9,384 |
| Misspellings tracked | 9 |
| Confusable pairs | 9 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for premise is 7 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈpɹɛm.ɪs/. Corpus data places it at rank #9,384 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 5 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 premise, with forms such as "permise", "ppremise", and "preimse". 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 9 confusable-pair relationships, "promise", "premium", "preside", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English premise, premisse, from Old French premisse, from Medieval Latin premissa (“set before”) (premissa propositio (“the proposition set before”)), feminine past participle of Latin praemittere (“to send or put before”), from prae- (“before”)… 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 premise, spelled P-R-E-M-I-S-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1A proposition antecedently supposed or proved; something previously stated or assumed as the basis of further argument; a condition; a supposition.
- 2Any of the first propositions of a syllogism, from which the conclusion is deduced.
- 3Matters previously stated or set forth; especially, that part in the beginning of a deed, the office of which is to express the grantor and grantee, and the land or thing granted or conveyed, and all that precedes the habendum; the thing demised or granted.
- 4A piece of real estate; a building and its adjuncts.
- 5The fundamental concept that drives the plot of a film or other story.
Etymology
From Middle English premise, premisse, from Old French premisse, from Medieval Latin premissa (“set before”) (premissa propositio (“the proposition set before”)), feminine past participle of Latin praemittere (“to send or put before”), from prae- (“before”) + mittere (“to send”). Sense 4, a piece of real estate arose from the misinterpretation of the word by property owners while reading title deeds where the word was used with the legal sense.
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: permise,ppremise,preimse,premies,premmise,premsie,prmeise,prremise,rpemise
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for premise
Misspelling Variants of "premise"
Frequency rank: #9,384 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter P in our English index: