screw
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 "screw", 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 "screw" 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 "screw" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
screw is aEnglishnoun. It means: A device that has a helical function. Pronounced /skɹuː/. It ranks #4,710 in English word frequency. Often confused with sew and sure.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | screw |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /skɹuː/ |
| Letters | 5 |
| Frequency rank | #4,710 |
| Misspellings tracked | 8 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for screw is 5 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /skɹuː/. Corpus data places it at rank #4,710 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 18 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 8 documented wrong-spelling variants for screw, with forms such as "csrew", "sccrew", and "scerw". 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, "sew", "sure", "sore", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English screw, scrue (“screw”); apparently, despite the difference in meaning, from Old French escroue (“nut, cylindrical socket, screwhole”), from Latin scrōfa (“female pig”) through comparison with the corkscrew shape of a pig's penis. There i… 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 screw, spelled S-C-R-E-W, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1A device that has a helical function.
- 2A device that has a helical function.
- 3A device that has a helical function.
- 4A device that has a helical function.
- 5A device that has a helical function.
- 6The motion of screwing something; a turn or twist to one side.
- 7A prison guard.
- 8An extortioner; a sharp bargainer; a skinflint.
- 9An instructor who examines with great or unnecessary severity; also, a searching or strict examination of a student by an instructor.
- 10Sexual intercourse; the act of screwing.
- 11A casual sexual partner.
- 12Salary, wages.
- 13Backspin.
- 14A small quantity of a material such as salt or tobacco wrapped in twist of paper.
- 15An old, worn-out, unsound and worthless horse.
- 16A straight line in space with which a definite linear magnitude termed the pitch is associated. It is used to express the displacement of a rigid body, which may always be made to consist of a rotation about an axis combined with a translation parallel to that axis.
- 17An amphipod crustacean.
- 18Rheumatism.
Etymology
From Middle English screw, scrue (“screw”); apparently, despite the difference in meaning, from Old French escroue (“nut, cylindrical socket, screwhole”), from Latin scrōfa (“female pig”) through comparison with the corkscrew shape of a pig's penis. There is also the Old French escruve (“screw”), from Old Dutch *scrūva ("screw"; whence Middle Dutch schruyve (“screw”)), which probably influenced or conflated with the aforementioned, resulting in the Middle English word. more on the etymology of screw Old French escroue (whence Medieval Latin scrofa (“nut, screwhole”)), is believed to be an adaptation of Latin scrōfa (“sow, female pig”); but this development is not found in other Romance languages. (For change in meaning, compare also Spanish puerca, Portuguese porca, both ‘sow; screw nut’, and is based on the fact that a boar's penis has a screw-like tip, making the sow's vulva equivalent to a screw nut by analogy). Old Dutch *scrūva possibly derives from Proto-Germanic *skrūbō (“screw”), from *skru- (“to cut”), from Proto-Indo-European *(s)keru-, *(s)ker- (“to cut”), and is related to German Schraube (“screw”), Low German schruve, schruwe (“screw”), Dutch schroef (“screw”), West Frisian skroef (“screw”), Danish skrue (“screw”), Swedish skruv (“screw, peg”), Icelandic skrúfa (“screw”). Compare also Occitan escrofa (“screw nut”), Calabrese scrufina (“screw nut”), which may be borrowings of the Old French word, or parallel developments.
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: csrew,sccrew,scerw,screww,scrrew,scrwe,srcew,sscrew
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for screw
Misspelling Variants of "screw"
Frequency rank: #4,710 in English
Frequently Asked Questions
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter S in our English index: