sake

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for sake is 4 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈseɪk/. Corpus data places it at rank #3,652 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 4 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 sake, with forms such as "aske", "saek", and "sakke". 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, "se", "SK", "she", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English sake (“sake, cause”), from Old English sacu (“cause, lawsuit, legal action, complaint, issue, dispute”), from Proto-West Germanic *saku, from Proto-Germanic *sakō (“affair, thing, charge, accusation, matter”), from Proto-Indo-European *s… 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 sake, spelled S-A-K-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.