roast
/ɹoʊst/
"roast" is a 5-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“roast” is a regularly-used English word, ranked #8,721 in English word frequency and used as a verb.
- #8,721
- frequency rank, English
- 5
- letters
- 7
- tracked misspellings
- 20
- confusable pairs
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed May 6, 2026) - To cook food by heating in an oven or over a fire without covering, resulting in a crisp, possibly even slightly charred appearance.
Visual similarity to commonly confused words
How many letter changes separate each confused pair (Levenshtein distance, normalized).
Source: PlainSpell confusable corpus (Wiktionary, CC BY-SA).
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | roast |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Verb |
| IPA | /ɹoʊst/ |
| Letters | 5 |
| Frequency rank | #8,721 |
| Misspellings tracked | 7 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Where “roast” sits in English frequency
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for roast is 5 letters long, classified as a verb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ɹoʊst/. Corpus data places it at rank #8,721 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text. Wiktionary records 7 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our generated misspelling index lists 7 likely wrong-spelling variants for roast, with forms such as "orast", "raost", and "roasst". Every one of these variants traces to a single-character edit -- an added or dropped letter, a swapped consonant, or a vowel swap -- the kind of slip a spell-checker is built to catch. It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "rot", "ROS", "rose", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English rosten, a borrowing from Old French rostir (“to roast, to torture with fire”), from Frankish *rōstijan (“to roast, broil”), from Proto-Germanic *raustijaną (“to roast”), from Proto-Indo-European *rews- (“to crackle; roast”). Cognate with… The correct English form is roast, spelled R-O-A-S-T.
Definition
- 1To cook food by heating in an oven or over a fire without covering, resulting in a crisp, possibly even slightly charred appearance.
- 2To cook by surrounding with hot embers, ashes, sand, etc.
- 3To process by drying through exposure to sun or artificial heat.
- 4To heat to excess; to heat violently; to burn.
- 5To admonish someone vigorously.
- 6To subject to bantering, severely criticize, sometimes as a comedy routine.
- 7To dissipate the volatile parts of by heat, as ores.
Etymology
From Middle English rosten, a borrowing from Old French rostir (“to roast, to torture with fire”), from Frankish *rōstijan (“to roast, broil”), from Proto-Germanic *raustijaną (“to roast”), from Proto-Indo-European *rews- (“to crackle; roast”). Cognate with Saterland Frisian rosterje (“to roast”), Dutch roosten, roosteren (“to roast”), German rösten (“to roast”). Displaced native Middle English breden, bræden (“to roast”), from Old English brǣdan, related to German braten (“to roast, grill”).
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: orast,raost,roasst,roastt,roats,rosat,rroast
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
How far each generated variant is from the correct spelling of roast - counted as single-character edits (an insertion, a deletion, or a substituted letter). The larger the bar, the easier the typo is to spot; one-edit slips are the ones that sneak past readers.
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
How do you spell "roast"?
What does "roast" mean?
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Using “roast”
The practical upshot for anyone who landed here from a spell-check.
- The one correct English spelling is R-O-A-S-T - every other letter order is a misspelling in standard orthography.
- Say it as /ɹoʊst/ (IPA); tap the speaker on the pronunciation badge to hear it where audio exists.
- Don't mix it up with “rot” - see the side-by-side comparison. roast vs rot
- Browse more English words and confusable pairs in the same reference. English words
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.