pull-someone-s-leg
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
Letters
18 characters
Language
English
word origin
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "pull-someone-s-leg", 18-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 "pull-someone-s-leg" 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 "pull-someone-s-leg" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
pull someone's leg is aEnglishverb. It means: To tease someone; to lead someone on; to goad someone into overreacting. It usually implies teasing or goading by jokingly lying.
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See how pull someone's leg compares against similar English words.
Browse all word comparisons →| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | pull someone's leg |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Verb |
| Letters | 18 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for pull someone's leg is 18 letters long, classified as averb. It sits outside the most-frequent rank tiers, which is often why uncommon words generate more spelling variants per reader.Wiktionary records 2 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
No frequent misspelling variants are recorded for pull someone's leg in our index, suggesting the orthography either follows predictable English patterns or the word is uncommon enough that typo corpora lack signal.It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, which tends to mean the word is visually distinctive enough to stand on its own.
Etymologically, the entry records: The phrase from Scotland originally meant to make a fool of someone, often by cheating him. One theory is that it is derived from tripping someone by yanking or pulling his leg in order to make him stumble and look foolish. 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 pull someone's leg, spelled P-U-L-L- -S-O-M-E-O-N-E-'-S- -L-E-G, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1To tease someone; to lead someone on; to goad someone into overreacting. It usually implies teasing or goading by jokingly lying.
- 2To extract money from someone (by taking out a loan or by swindling).
Etymology
The phrase from Scotland originally meant to make a fool of someone, often by cheating him. One theory is that it is derived from tripping someone by yanking or pulling his leg in order to make him stumble and look foolish.
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter P in our English index: