rice
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
Letters
4 characters
Language
English
word origin
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "rice", 4-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 "rice" 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 "rice" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
rice is aEnglishnoun. It means: Cereal plants, Oryza sativa of the grass family whose seeds are used as food. Pronounced /ɹaɪs/. It ranks #2,758 in English word frequency. Often confused with rid and Rio.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | rice |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /ɹaɪs/ |
| Letters | 4 |
| Frequency rank | #2,758 |
| Misspellings tracked | 5 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for rice is 4 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ɹaɪs/. Corpus data places it at rank #2,758 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 5 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 5 documented wrong-spelling variants for rice, with forms such as "irce", "rcie", and "ricce". 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, "rid", "Rio", "rip", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English rys, from Old French ris, from Old Italian riso, risi, from Byzantine Greek ὄρυζα (óruza), from an Eastern Iranian language related to Middle Persian blnc (*brinǰ), Northern Kurdish riz (beyond Euphrates) and Zazaki riz. Theorized to com… 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 rice, spelled R-I-C-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1Cereal plants, Oryza sativa of the grass family whose seeds are used as food.
- 2A specific variety of this plant.
- 3The seeds of this plant used as food.
- 4The types of automobile modifications characteristic of a rice burner.
- 5An instance of customization of a user interface.
Etymology
From Middle English rys, from Old French ris, from Old Italian riso, risi, from Byzantine Greek ὄρυζα (óruza), from an Eastern Iranian language related to Middle Persian blnc (*brinǰ), Northern Kurdish riz (beyond Euphrates) and Zazaki riz. Theorized to come to Iranian languages from Sanskrit व्रीहि (vrīhi). Prior to Sanskrit, it is speculated to be possibly a borrowing from a Dravidian language (compare Proto-Dravidian *wariñci (“rice”)), or from Austroasiatic languages further east. Alternatively Byzantine Greek ὄρυζα (óruza) is said to be from Hebrew אורז (órez), from South Arabian areez ultimately from Old Tamil 𑀅𑀭𑀺𑀘𑀺 (arici). Doublet of arroz.
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: irce,rcie,ricce,riec,rrice
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for rice
Misspelling Variants of "rice"
Frequency rank: #2,758 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter R in our English index: