purse

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for purse is 5 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /pɜːs/. Corpus data places it at rank #7,727 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 7 documented wrong-spelling variants for purse, with forms such as "ppurse", "pruse", and "pures". 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", "puts", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English purs, from Old English purs (“purse”), partly from pusa (“wallet, bag, scrip”) and partly from burse (“pouch, bag”). Old English pusa comes from Proto-West Germanic *pusō, from Proto-Germanic *pusô (“bag, sack, scrip”), and is cognate wi… 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 purse, spelled P-U-R-S-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.