salary
/ˈsæl.ə.ɹi/
"salary" is a 6-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“salary” is a regularly-used English word, ranked #3,906 in English word frequency and used as a noun.
- #3,906
- frequency rank, English
- 6
- letters
- 9
- tracked misspellings
- 20
- confusable pairs
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed May 6, 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.
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) |
Where “salary” sits in English frequency
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for salary is 6 letters long, classified as a noun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈsæl.ə.ɹi/. Corpus data places it at rank #3,906 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text. The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "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.
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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Using “salary”
The practical upshot for anyone who landed here from a spell-check.
- The one correct English spelling is S-A-L-A-R-Y - every other letter order is a misspelling in standard orthography.
- Say it as /ˈsæl.ə.ɹi/ (IPA); tap the speaker on the pronunciation badge to hear it where audio exists.
- Don't mix it up with “slay” - see the side-by-side comparison. salary vs slay
- 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.