salary
/ˈsæl.ə.ɹi/
"salary" is a 6-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“salary” has 9 generated spelling variants in the English index at frequency #3,906. The variants make it a useful spelling check.
- #3,906
- frequency rank, English
- 6,566
- “S” headwords
- 9
- tracked misspellings
- 20
- confusable pairs
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - A fixed amount of money paid to a worker, usually calculated on a monthly or annual basis, not hourly, as wages. Implies a degree of professionalism and/or autonomy.
Corpus desk
Index EN-salary · salary · English
salary · rank #3,906 · 9 variants · 20 confusables
- FREQ-COMMON #3,906
- LEN-LONG 6 letters
- VOW-3 3 vowels
- CONFUS-HIGH 20 pairs
- VAR-MID 9 variants
- BOOK-DENSE 6,566
- PHOTO-FINISH roughly
Nearest frequency peer: roughly (-1 rank slots)
Read with this headword: Spelling guide for this pattern
Desk codes from Wiktionary headword shape, FrequencyWords rank tier, confusable-pair count, generated misspelling depth, letter-cohort book size, and photo-finish peer. Not a difficulty grade.
Rank peers near misspelling magnet “salary”
Same rarity band: useful when a typo lands on a peer headword
- representing
representing
96,098 corpus weight
- residence
residence
96,097 corpus weight
- roughly
roughly
96,096 corpus weight
- salary
salary
96,095 corpus weight
- scoring
scoring
96,094 corpus weight
- script
script
96,093 corpus weight
What this shows “salary” sits among these FrequencyWords peers; misspelling depth is tracked separately in the edit-distance chart.
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 | salary |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /ˈsæl.ə.ɹi/ |
| Letters | 6 |
| Frequency rank | #3,906 |
| Misspellings tracked | 9 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency seat of misspelling magnet “salary”
A misspelling magnet
The generator records 9 spelling variants around salary (IPA /ˈsæl.ə.ɹi/), anoun. Corpus frequency is #3,906 among 6,566 “S” headwords. Dominant gloss: "A fixed amount of money paid to a worker, usually calculated on a monthly or annual basis, not hourly, as wages. Implies a degree of professionalism and/or autonomy.".
Our generated misspelling index lists 9 likely wrong-spelling variants for salary, with forms such as "aslary", "saalry", and "salarry". Each variant is a distinct typo pattern an edit-distance generator flags, typically a doubled-consonant error, a silent-letter drop, or a vowel substitution. It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "slay", "solar", "scary", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English salarie, from Anglo-Norman salarie, from Old French salaire, from Latin salārium (“wages”), the neuter form of the adjective salārius (“related to salt”), from sal (“salt”). There have been various attempts to explain how the Latin term … The correct English form is salary, spelled S-A-L-A-R-Y.
Definition
- 1A fixed amount of money paid to a worker, usually calculated on a monthly or annual basis, not hourly, as wages. Implies a degree of professionalism and/or autonomy.
Recorded use
Wiktionary examplesThese source excerpts show how salary appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
This is hire and salary, not revenge.
Andrew Houſtoun and Adam Muſhet, being Tackſmen of the Excize, did Imploy Thomas Rue to be their Collector, and gave him a Sallary of 30. pound Sterling for a year.
Etymology
From Middle English salarie, from Anglo-Norman salarie, from Old French salaire, from Latin salārium (“wages”), the neuter form of the adjective salārius (“related to salt”), from sal (“salt”). There have been various attempts to explain how the Latin term for “wages” came from the adjective “related to salt”. It is generally assumed that salārium was an abbreviation of salārium argentum (“salt money”), though that phrase is not attested. A commonly cited theory states that the phrase meant “money consisting of salt”, because, supposedly, Roman soldiers were sometimes paid in salt, but there is no evidence for either of these claims from ancient sources. Another is that the phrase meant “money used to buy salt [and other miscellaneous items]”.
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as:
- aslary
- saalry
- salarry
- salaryy
- salayr
- sallary
- salray
- slaary
- ssalary
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
How far each generated variant is from the correct spelling of salary - expressed in single-character edits (insert, delete, or swap one letter). Bigger bars stand out at a glance; a one-edit slip is the hardest to catch.
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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Similar English words by spelling shape
Same letter count and similar misspelling depth for "salary", not the corpus desk frequency band.
Same letter count
Frequency-ranked English headwords with 6 letters (nearest by frequency rank).
Similar misspelling depth
Headwords with a similar count of attested misspellings (9 here; floor ≥5).