scout
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
Letters
5 characters
Language
English
word origin
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "scout", 5-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 "scout" 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 "scout" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
scout is aEnglishnoun. It means: A person sent out to gather and bring back information; especially, one employed in war to gain information about the enemy and ground. Pronounced /skaʊt/. It ranks #7,498 in English word frequency. Often confused with sou and sot.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | scout |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /skaʊt/ |
| Letters | 5 |
| Frequency rank | #7,498 |
| Misspellings tracked | 7 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for scout is 5 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /skaʊt/. Corpus data places it at rank #7,498 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 11 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 7 documented wrong-spelling variants for scout, with forms such as "csout", "sccout", and "scotu". 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, "sou", "sot", "shot", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English scout, scoult, from Old French escoute (“action of listening”), verbal noun from escouter (“to listen, heed”), from Latin auscultō (“to listen”). The verb comes from the noun. 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 scout, spelled S-C-O-U-T, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1A person sent out to gather and bring back information; especially, one employed in war to gain information about the enemy and ground.
- 2An act of scouting or reconnoitering.
- 3A member of any number of youth organizations belonging to the international scout movement, such as the Boy Scouts of America or Girl Scouts of the United States.
- 4A person who assesses or recruits others; especially, one who identifies promising talent on behalf of a sports team.
- 5A person employed to monitor rivals' activities in the petroleum industry.
- 6A housekeeper or domestic cleaner, generally female, employed by one of the constituent colleges of Oxford University to clean rooms; generally equivalent to a modern bedder at Cambridge University.
- 7A domestic servant, generally male, who would attend (usually several) students in a variety of ways, including cleaning; generally equivalent to a gyp at Cambridge University or a skip at Trinity College, Dublin.
- 8A fielder in a game for practice.
- 9A fighter aircraft.
- 10A preliminary image that allows the technician to make adjustments before the actual diagnostic images.
- 11A term of address for a man or boy.
Etymology
From Middle English scout, scoult, from Old French escoute (“action of listening”), verbal noun from escouter (“to listen, heed”), from Latin auscultō (“to listen”). The verb comes from the noun.
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: csout,sccout,scotu,scoutt,scuot,socut,sscout
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for scout
Misspelling Variants of "scout"
Frequency rank: #7,498 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter S in our English index: