seek
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
Letters
4 characters
Language
English
word origin
Source
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "seek", 4-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 "seek" 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 "seek" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
seek is aEnglishverb. It means: To try to find; to look for; to search for. Pronounced /siːk/. It ranks #2,462 in English word frequency. Often confused with SK and she.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | seek |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Verb |
| IPA | /siːk/ |
| Letters | 4 |
| Frequency rank | #2,462 |
| Misspellings tracked | 5 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for seek is 4 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /siːk/. Corpus data places it at rank #2,462 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 7 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 5 documented wrong-spelling variants for seek, with forms such as "esek", "seekk", and "sek". 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, "SK", "she", "set", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English seken (also sechen, whence dialectal English seech), from Old English sēċan (compare beseech); from Proto-West Germanic *sōkijan, from Proto-Germanic *sōkijaną (“to seek”), from Proto-Indo-European *seh₂g- (“to seek out”). Cognate with S… 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 seek, spelled S-E-E-K, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1To try to find; to look for; to search for.
- 2To ask for; to solicit; to beseech.
- 3To try to acquire or gain; to strive after; to aim at.
- 4To go, move, travel (in a given direction).
- 5To try to reach or come to; to go to; to resort to.
- 6To attempt, endeavour, try
- 7To navigate through a data stream.
Etymology
From Middle English seken (also sechen, whence dialectal English seech), from Old English sēċan (compare beseech); from Proto-West Germanic *sōkijan, from Proto-Germanic *sōkijaną (“to seek”), from Proto-Indo-European *seh₂g- (“to seek out”). Cognate with Saterland Frisian säike (“to seek”), West Frisian sykje (“to seek”), Dutch zoeken (“to seek”), Low German söken (“to seek”), German suchen (“to seek”), Danish søge (“to seek”), Swedish söka, Norwegian Bokmål søke (“to seek”), Norwegian Nynorsk søkja (“to seek”), Icelandic sækja (“to seek”). The Middle English and later Modern English hard /k/ derives from Old English sēcð, the third person singular; the forms with /k/ were then reinforced by cognate Old Norse sǿkja.
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: esek,seekk,sek,seke,sseek
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for seek
Misspelling Variants of "seek"
Frequency rank: #2,462 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter S in our English index: