rope
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 "rope", 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 "rope" 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 "rope" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
rope is aEnglishnoun. It means: Thick strings, yarn, monofilaments, metal wires, or strands of other cordage that are twisted together to form a stronger line. Pronounced /ɹəʊp/. It ranks #6,517 in English word frequency. Often confused with RP and row.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | rope |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /ɹəʊp/ |
| Letters | 4 |
| Frequency rank | #6,517 |
| Misspellings tracked | 5 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for rope is 4 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ɹəʊp/. Corpus data places it at rank #6,517 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 17 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 rope, with forms such as "orpe", "roep", and "roppe". 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, "RP", "row", "Roy", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English rop, rope, from Old English rāp (“rope, cord, cable”), from Proto-West Germanic *raip, from Proto-Germanic *raipaz, *raipą (“rope, cord, band, ringlet”), from Proto-Indo-European *h₁roypnós (“strap, band, rope”), from *h₁reyp- (“to peel … 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 rope, spelled R-O-P-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1Thick strings, yarn, monofilaments, metal wires, or strands of other cordage that are twisted together to form a stronger line.
- 2An individual length of such material.
- 3A cohesive strand of something.
- 4A continuous stream.
- 5A hard line drive.
- 6A long thin segment of soft clay, either extruded or formed by hand.
- 7A data structure resembling a string, using a concatenation tree in which each leaf represents a character.
- 8A kind of chaff (material dropped to interfere with radar) consisting of foil strips with paper chutes attached.
- 9A unit of distance equivalent to the distance covered in six months by a god flying at ten million miles per second.
- 10A necklace of at least one meter in length.
- 11Cordage of at least one inch in diameter, or a length of such cordage.
- 12A unit of length equal to twenty feet.
- 13Rohypnol.
- 14Semen being ejaculated.
- 15Death by hanging.
- 16An apparatus, currently with limited use by the senior contestants and not used in world-wide tournaments.
- 17An apparatus, currently with limited use by the senior contestants and not used in world-wide tournaments.
Etymology
From Middle English rop, rope, from Old English rāp (“rope, cord, cable”), from Proto-West Germanic *raip, from Proto-Germanic *raipaz, *raipą (“rope, cord, band, ringlet”), from Proto-Indo-European *h₁roypnós (“strap, band, rope”), from *h₁reyp- (“to peel off, tear; border, edge, strip”). Cognates Cognate with Scots rape, raip (“rope”), Saterland Frisian Roop (“rope”), West Frisian reap (“rope, cord”), Dutch roop, reep (“rope, cord, ring, strip, bar”), German Low German Reep (“rope”), Swedish rep (“rope”), Danish reb (“rope”), Icelandic reipi (“rope”), Albanian rrip (“belt, rope”).
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: orpe,roep,roppe,rpoe,rrope
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for rope
Misspelling Variants of "rope"
Frequency rank: #6,517 in English
Frequently Asked Questions
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter R in our English index: