sheep
/ˈʃiːp/noun
sheep is spelled S-H-E-E-P. The wrong spelling people search most is sheeps: about 290 Bing searches a month in the United States (September 2025 to August 2026), about 1 in 42 of all searches for the word. Sheep is a noun meaning “A woolly ruminant of the genus Ovis”.
How many letters and syllables are in sheep?
| Letters | 5: S-H-E-E-P |
|---|---|
| Syllables | 1 |
| In writing | 15 times per million words; the 5,206th most frequent word form |
| Wrong spellings searched | 1; the most searched, sheeps, about 290 Bing searches a month (all of them) |
Sources: letters and syllables from the English Wiktionary's hyphenation or pronunciation; written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media); Bing searches in the United States: the average month from September 2025 to August 2026 (Microsoft Advertising keyword data through DataForSEO, read September 30, 2026).
How do you spell sheep?
Sheep is spelled S-H-E-E-P. One wrong spelling is searched or written often enough to measure; together they are about 1 in 42 of the searches for sheep in either form.
Bing searches in the United States: the average month from September 2025 to August 2026 (Microsoft Advertising keyword data through DataForSEO, read September 30, 2026). Wrong spellings are taken from Wiktionary entries tagged "misspelling" and its obsolete or nonstandard forms, Wikipedia's Lists of common misspellings and the codespell dictionary, then measured. The proofreader's marks show the change that corrects each one.
How common is sheep?
Sheep appears 15 times per million words in written English, the 5,206th most frequent word form in the list.
Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).
How do you pronounce sheep?
- /ˈʃiːp/
- [ˈʃɪi̯p]
Sheep has one syllable.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: En-uk-a_sheep.ogg, En-us-sheep.ogg, LL-Q1860_(eng)-Naomi_Persephone_Amethyst_(NaomiAmethyst)-sheep.wav, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).
What does sheep mean?
The meanings the English Wiktionary records, quoted as written there (source below).
noun
- 1
A woolly ruminant of the genus Ovis.
- 2
A member of the domestic species Ovis aries, the most well-known species of Ovis.
- 3
A timid, shy person who is easily led by others.
- 4
A religious adherent, a member of a congregation or religious community (compare flock).
- 5
Sheepskin leather.
- 6
A person who is easily understood by a speech recognition system; contrasted with goat.
- 7
A gullible person.
- 8
plural of shoop
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
Sheep in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese
| Language | Words |
|---|---|
| French | mouton |
| German | Schaf |
| Portuguese | ovelha , pusilânime |
| Spanish | carnero, oveja , pusilánime, papanatas, borrego |
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Translations are Wiktionary's, by sense; a linked word has its own PlainSpell page.
Where does sheep come from?
Inherited from Middle English schep, schepe, from Anglian Old English sċēp (West Saxon sċēap), from Proto-West Germanic *skāp, from Proto-Germanic *skēpą, of unknown origin. Perhaps from the same Scythian word (compare Ossetian цӕу (cæw, “goat”), Persian چپش (čapiš, “yearling goat”)) which was borrowed into Albanian as cjap, sqap (“buck”) and into Slavic (compare Polish cap). After Kroonen, *skēpą is instead from the root of Proto-Germanic *skabaną (“to scratch”) via Kluge's law.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).