refereed
/ˌɹɛfəˈɹiːd/
"refereed" is a 8-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“refereed” is uncommon English (frequency #51,352 among 21,470 “R” headwords), classed as a verb. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- #51,352
- frequency rank, English
- 21,470
- “R” headwords
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed May 6, 2026) - simple past and past participle of referee
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | refereed |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Verb |
| IPA | /ˌɹɛfəˈɹiːd/ |
| Letters | 8 |
| Frequency rank | #51,352 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Where “refereed” sits in English frequency
Rare enough to double-check
refereed is uncommon English at frequency #51,352 among 21,470 “R” headwords, classed as averb, transcribed /ˌɹɛfəˈɹiːd/. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. Gloss: "simple past and past participle of referee".
Our edit-distance generator produced no likely misspellings for refereed, since its letter sequence doesn't invite the usual edit-distance slips. Our confusable-pair dataset has no match for it, since nothing in our dataset looks or sounds close enough to cause mix-ups.
No borrowing history is documented for this entry, so spelling patterns must be inferred from the word's phoneme-to-grapheme mapping rather than from a documented borrowing chain. The correct English form is refereed, spelled R-E-F-E-R-E-E-D.
Definition
- 1simple past and past participle of referee
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA); frequency ordering uses the FrequencyWords open word-frequency list (2018 English corpus, MIT). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Using “refereed”
The practical upshot for anyone who landed here from a spell-check.
- The one correct English spelling is R-E-F-E-R-E-E-D - every other letter order is a misspelling in standard orthography.
- Say it as /ˌɹɛfəˈɹiːd/ (IPA); tap the speaker on the pronunciation badge to hear it where audio exists.
- Browse more English words and confusable pairs in the same reference. English words
Other uncommon English words near this rank
Data Source
Wiktionary (via kaikki.org), licensed under CC BY-SA & GFDL. Word ordering uses an open word-frequency list; misspelling variants are generated by edit-distance from the correct headword.