sheriff
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
Letters
7 characters
Language
English
word origin
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "sheriff", 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 "sheriff" 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 "sheriff" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
sheriff is aEnglishnoun. It means: (High Sheriff) An official of a shire or county office, responsible for carrying out court orders, law enforcement and other duties. Pronounced /ˈʃɛɹɪf/. It ranks #5,550 in English word frequency. Often confused with serif and sharif.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | sheriff |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /ˈʃɛɹɪf/ |
| Letters | 7 |
| Frequency rank | #5,550 |
| Misspellings tracked | 9 |
| Confusable pairs | 2 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for sheriff is 7 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈʃɛɹɪf/. Corpus data places it at rank #5,550 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 3 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 9 documented wrong-spelling variants for sheriff, with forms such as "hseriff", "sehriff", and "sheirff". 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 2 confusable-pair relationships, "serif", "sharif", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: Inherited from Middle English shirreve, in turn inherited from Old English sċīrġerēfa, corresponding to shire + reeve. There is no etymological connection to Sharif (Arabic شَرِيف (šarīf)), an Arabic title of honour with cognates in other languages, includi… 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 sheriff, spelled S-H-E-R-I-F-F, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1(High Sheriff) An official of a shire or county office, responsible for carrying out court orders, law enforcement and other duties.
- 2A judge in the sheriff court, the court of a county or sheriffdom.
- 3A government official, usually responsible for law enforcement in their county and for administration of the county jail, sometimes an officer of the court, usually elected.
Etymology
Inherited from Middle English shirreve, in turn inherited from Old English sċīrġerēfa, corresponding to shire + reeve. There is no etymological connection to Sharif (Arabic شَرِيف (šarīf)), an Arabic title of honour with cognates in other languages, including Persian, Punjabi, Bengali, Hindi, Urdu, Turkish, Spanish, Portuguese, etc.
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: hseriff,sehriff,sheirff,sherfif,sherif,sherriff,shheriff,shreiff,ssheriff
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for sheriff
Misspelling Variants of "sheriff"
Frequency rank: #5,550 in English
Frequently Asked Questions
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter S in our English index: