pulse
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
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5 characters
Language
English
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "pulse", 5-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 "pulse" 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 "pulse" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
pulse is aEnglishnoun. It means: A normally regular beat felt when arteries near the skin (for example, at the neck or wrist) are depressed, caused by the heart pumping blood through them; the qualitative nature of this beat. Pronounced /pʌls/. It ranks #6,507 in English word frequency. Often confused with pus and push.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | pulse |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /pʌls/ |
| Letters | 5 |
| Frequency rank | #6,507 |
| Misspellings tracked | 7 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for pulse is 5 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /pʌls/. Corpus data places it at rank #6,507 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 11 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 7 documented wrong-spelling variants for pulse, with forms such as "pluse", "ppulse", and "pules". 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, "pus", "push", "pure", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Late Middle English pulse, Middle English pous, pouse (“regular beat of arteries, pulse; heartbeat; place on the body where a pulse is detectable; beat (of a musical instrument); energy, vitality”) [and other forms], from Anglo-Norman puls, pous, pus, … 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 pulse, spelled P-U-L-S-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1A normally regular beat felt when arteries near the skin (for example, at the neck or wrist) are depressed, caused by the heart pumping blood through them; the qualitative nature of this beat.
- 2The rate of this beat as an indication of a person's health.
- 3A beat or throb; also, a repeated sequence of such beats or throbs.
- 4The focus of energy or vigour of an activity, place, or thing; also, the feeling of bustle, busyness, or energy in a place; the heartbeat.
- 5An (increased) amount of a substance (such as a drug or an isotopic label) given over a short time.
- 6A setting on a food processor which causes it to work in a series of short bursts rather than continuously, in order to break up ingredients without liquidizing them; also, a use of this setting.
- 7The beat or tactus of a piece of music or verse; also, a repeated sequence of such beats.
- 8A brief burst of electromagnetic energy, such as light, radio waves, etc.
- 9Synonym of autosoliton (“a stable solitary localized structure that arises in nonlinear spatially extended dissipative systems due to mechanisms of self-organization”).
- 10A brief increase in the strength of an electrical signal; an impulse.
- 11A timed, coordinated connection, when multiple public transportation vehicles are at a hub at the same time so that passengers can flexibly connect between them.
Etymology
From Late Middle English pulse, Middle English pous, pouse (“regular beat of arteries, pulse; heartbeat; place on the body where a pulse is detectable; beat (of a musical instrument); energy, vitality”) [and other forms], from Anglo-Norman puls, pous, pus, and Middle French pouls, poulz, pous [and other forms], Old French pous, pulz (“regular beat of arteries; place on the body where a pulse is detectable”) (modern French pouls), and from their etymon Latin pulsus (“beat, impulse, pulse, stroke; regular beat of arteries or the heart”), from pellō (“to drive, impel, propel, push; to banish, eject, expel; to set in motion; to strike”) (ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *pel- (“to beat, strike; to drive; to push, thrust”)) + -sus (a variant of -tus (suffix forming action nouns from verbs)).
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: pluse,ppulse,pules,pullse,pulsse,pusle,uplse
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for pulse
Misspelling Variants of "pulse"
Frequency rank: #6,507 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter P in our English index: