rat
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "rat", 3-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 "rat" 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 "rat" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
rat is aEnglishnoun. It means: Any of the numerous members of several rodent families that usually have short limbs, a pointy snout, a long, hairless tail, and a body length greater than about 12 cm, or 5 inches. Pronounced /ɹæt/. It ranks #5,446 in English word frequency. Often confused with re and RS.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | rat |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /ɹæt/ |
| Letters | 3 |
| Frequency rank | #5,446 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for rat is 3 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ɹæt/. Corpus data places it at rank #5,446 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 10 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
No frequent misspelling variants are recorded for rat in our index, suggesting the orthography either follows predictable English patterns or the word is uncommon enough that typo corpora lack signal.It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "re", "RS", "rd", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English ratte, rat, rotte, from Old English rætt, from Proto-West Germanic *ratt, from Proto-Germanic *rattaz, *rattō (compare West Frisian rôt, Dutch rat), of uncertain origin, possibly from Proto-Indo-European *Hreh₃d- (“to scrape, scratch, gn… 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 rat, spelled R-A-T, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1Any of the numerous members of several rodent families that usually have short limbs, a pointy snout, a long, hairless tail, and a body length greater than about 12 cm, or 5 inches.
- 2A medium-sized rodent belonging to the genus Rattus.
- 3A person who is known for betrayal.
- 4An informant or snitch.
- 5A scab: a worker who acts against trade union policies.
- 6A person who routinely spends time at a particular location.
- 7A wad of shed hair used as part of a hairstyle.
- 8A roll of material used to puff out the hair, which is turned over it.
- 9Vagina, vulva.
- 10Ellipsis of muskrat.
Etymology
From Middle English ratte, rat, rotte, from Old English rætt, from Proto-West Germanic *ratt, from Proto-Germanic *rattaz, *rattō (compare West Frisian rôt, Dutch rat), of uncertain origin, possibly from Proto-Indo-European *Hreh₃d- (“to scrape, scratch, gnaw”). However, the rat may have been unknown in Northern Europe in antiquity, and the Proto-Germanic word may have referred to a different animal; see *rattaz for more. Attestation of this family of words begins in the 12th century. Some of the Germanic cognates show considerable consonant variation, e.g. Middle Low German ratte, radde; Middle High German rate, ratte, ratze. The irregularity may be symptomatic of a late dispersal of the word, although Kroonen accounts for it with a Proto-Germanic stem *raþō nom., *ruttaz gen., showing both ablaut and a Kluge's law alternation, with the variation arising from varying remodellings in the descendants. Kroonen states that this requires a Proto-Indo-European etymon in final *t and is incompatible with the usual derivation from Proto-Indo-European *Hreh₃d- (“to scrape, scratch, gnaw”).
This word in other languages
Frequency rank: #5,446 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter R in our English index: