saturday-night-special
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
Letters
22 characters
Language
English
word origin
Source
Wiktionary
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "saturday-night-special", 22-letters, with pronunciation in International Phonetic Alphabet notation, etymology traced through Germanic and Romance roots where applicable, common misspelling variants catalogued from Wiktionary, and usage frequency ranked against an open word-frequency list covering the top 100,000 English words. PlainSpell covers English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and German spelling with confusable-pair detection that highlights visually and phonetically similar words. This entry for "saturday-night-special" 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 "saturday-night-special" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
Saturday-night special is aEnglishnoun. It means: An inexpensive, easily obtained handgun.
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Browse all word comparisons →| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | Saturday-night special |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| Letters | 22 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for Saturday-night special is 22 letters long, classified as anoun. It sits outside the most-frequent rank tiers, which is often why uncommon words generate more spelling variants per reader.Wiktionary records 5 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
No misspelling variants are generated for Saturday-night special in our index, suggesting the orthography follows predictable English patterns.It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, which tends to mean the word is visually distinctive enough to stand on its own.
Etymologically, the entry records: Attested from 1917, akin to Saturday-night pistol attested from 1915. Not entirely clear, but perhaps from phrases like “Saturday night pistol slaying” and “Saturday night pistol scrape” often found in early 20th century local crime reporting due to the fac… 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 Saturday-night special, spelled S-A-T-U-R-D-A-Y---N-I-G-H-T- -S-P-E-C-I-A-L, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1An inexpensive, easily obtained handgun.
- 2An overnight weekend train.
- 3A seasonal (usually October to December) sale on Saturday evening.
- 4A girl who can be dated easily on Saturday evenings.
- 5An unexpected takeover bid that gives its opponents little time to respond.
Etymology
Attested from 1917, akin to Saturday-night pistol attested from 1915. Not entirely clear, but perhaps from phrases like “Saturday night pistol slaying” and “Saturday night pistol scrape” often found in early 20th century local crime reporting due to the fact that Saturday evening had been the peak time for homicides and similar crimes. Also likely to be enforced by the obsolete meaning of a cheap sale and usage of "Special" in the context of more powerful firearms like Colt Police Positive Special.
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter S in our English index: