shuttle
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
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7 characters
Language
English
word origin
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "shuttle", 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 "shuttle" 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 "shuttle" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
shuttle is aEnglishnoun. It means: A tool used to carry the woof back and forth between the warp threads on a loom. Pronounced /ˈʃʌtəl/. It ranks #8,349 in English word frequency. Often confused with subtle and settle.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | shuttle |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /ˈʃʌtəl/ |
| Letters | 7 |
| Frequency rank | #8,349 |
| Misspellings tracked | 9 |
| Confusable pairs | 6 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for shuttle is 7 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈʃʌtəl/. Corpus data places it at rank #8,349 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 9 documented wrong-spelling variants for shuttle, with forms such as "hsuttle", "shhuttle", and "shtutle". 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 6 confusable-pair relationships, "subtle", "settle", "Seattle", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: From a merger of two words: * Middle English shutel, shotel, schetel, schettell, schyttyl, scutel (“bar; bolt”), from Old English sċyttel, sċutel (“bar; bolt”), equivalent to shut + -le * Middle English shutel, schetil, shotil, shetel, schootyll, shutyll, 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 shuttle, spelled S-H-U-T-T-L-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1A tool used to carry the woof back and forth between the warp threads on a loom.
- 2The sliding thread holder in a sewing machine, which carries the lower thread through a loop of the upper thread, to make a lock stitch.
- 3A transport service (such as a bus or train) that goes back and forth between two or more places.
- 4Such a transport vehicle; a shuttle bus; a space shuttle.
- 5Any other item that moves repeatedly back and forth between two positions, possibly transporting something else with it between those points (such as, in chemistry, a molecular shuttle).
- 6A shuttlecock.
- 7A shutter, as for a channel for molten metal.
Etymology
From a merger of two words: * Middle English shutel, shotel, schetel, schettell, schyttyl, scutel (“bar; bolt”), from Old English sċyttel, sċutel (“bar; bolt”), equivalent to shut + -le * Middle English shutel, schetil, shotil, shetel, schootyll, shutyll, schytle, scytyl (“missile; projectile; spear”), from Old English sċytel, sċutel (“dart, arrow”), from Proto-Germanic *skutilaz. The name for a loom weaving instrument, recorded from 1338, is from a sense of being "shot" across the threads. The back-and-forth imagery inspired the extension to "passenger trains" in 1895, aircraft in 1942, and spacecraft in 1969, as well as older terms such as shuttlecock.
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: hsuttle,shhuttle,shtutle,shutle,shutlte,shuttel,shuttlle,sshuttle,suhttle
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for shuttle
Misspelling Variants of "shuttle"
Frequency rank: #8,349 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter S in our English index: