scruple
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "scruple", 7-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 "scruple" 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 "scruple" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
scruple is aEnglishnoun. It means: Hesitation to act from the difficulty of determining what is right or expedient; doubt, hesitation or unwillingness due to motives of conscience; moral qualm. Pronounced /ˈskɹuːpəl/.
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Browse all word comparisons →| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | scruple |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /ˈskɹuːpəl/ |
| Letters | 7 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for scruple is 7 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈskɹuːpəl/. 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 frequent misspelling variants are recorded for scruple in our index, suggesting the orthography either follows predictable English patterns or the word is uncommon enough that typo corpora lack signal.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: From Old French scrupule, from Latin scrūpulus (“(literally) a small sharp or pointed stone; uneasiness of mind, anxiety, doubt, trouble; scruple”) and scrūpulum (“one twenty-fourth of an ounce”), diminutives of scrūpus (“a rough or sharp stone; anxiety, un… 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 scruple, spelled S-C-R-U-P-L-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1Hesitation to act from the difficulty of determining what is right or expedient; doubt, hesitation or unwillingness due to motives of conscience; moral qualm.
- 2A weight of ¹⁄₂₈₈ of a pound, that is, twenty grains or one third of a dram, about 1.3 grams (symbol: ℈).
- 3A Hebrew unit of time equal to ¹⁄₁₀₈₀ hour.
- 4A very small quantity; a particle.
- 5A doubt or uncertainty concerning a matter of fact; intellectual perplexity.
Etymology
From Old French scrupule, from Latin scrūpulus (“(literally) a small sharp or pointed stone; uneasiness of mind, anxiety, doubt, trouble; scruple”) and scrūpulum (“one twenty-fourth of an ounce”), diminutives of scrūpus (“a rough or sharp stone; anxiety, uneasiness”); perhaps akin to Ancient Greek σκύρος (skúros, “the chippings of stone”), from ξυρόν (xurón, “razor”), from ξύω (xúō, “to scrape”), from Proto-Indo-European *ksew-. Doublet of escropulo and escrupulo.
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter S in our English index: