search engine
"search-engine" is a 12-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“search engine” is uncommon English (outside the top frequency list), classed as a noun. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency English
- 13
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - An application that searches for, and retrieves, data based on some criteria, especially one that searches the Internet for documents containing specified words.
Corpus desk
Index EN-search-engine · search engine · English
search engine · unranked · 0 variants · 0 confusables
- FREQ-UNRANKED Unranked
- LEN-MEGA 13 letters
- VOW-5 5 vowels
- CONFUS-0 No pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-THIN "S" thin
- PHOTO-UNK Peer pending
Read with this headword: Spelling guide for this pattern
Desk codes from Wiktionary headword shape, FrequencyWords rank tier, confusable-pair count, generated misspelling depth, letter-cohort book size, and photo-finish peer. Not a difficulty grade.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | search engine |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| Letters | 13 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Long-tail rank of “search engine” in English
Rare enough to double-check
search engine is uncommon English outside the top frequency list, classed as anoun. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. Gloss: "An application that searches for, and retrieves, data based on some criteria, especially one that searches the Internet for documents containing specified words.".
No misspelling variants are generated for search engine in our index, and the word's spelling is regular enough that our generator found nothing worth flagging. This entry stands alone in our confusable dataset, since nothing in our dataset looks or sounds close enough to cause mix-ups.
No borrowing history is documented for this entry, so its spelling is best read as a straightforward mapping from sound to letter. The correct English form is search engine, spelled S-E-A-R-C-H- -E-N-G-I-N-E.
Definition
- 1An application that searches for, and retrieves, data based on some criteria, especially one that searches the Internet for documents containing specified words.
Recorded use
Wiktionary examplesThese source excerpts show how search engine appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
The MEMEX search engine with Textract software has been proved able to search the 1,251,521 records of the Pre-1920 Catalogue in four minutes.
It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advert…
This word in other languages
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.