sister
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
Letters
6 characters
Language
English
word origin
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "sister", 6-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 "sister" 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 "sister" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
sister is aEnglishnoun. It means: A daughter of the same parents as another person; a female sibling. Pronounced /ˈsɪs.tə(ɹ)/. It ranks #1,207 in English word frequency. Often confused with site and sites.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | sister |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /ˈsɪs.tə(ɹ)/ |
| Letters | 6 |
| Frequency rank | #1,207 |
| Misspellings tracked | 9 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for sister is 6 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈsɪs.tə(ɹ)/. Corpus data places it at rank #1,207 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 12 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 sister, with forms such as "isster", "sisetr", and "sisster". 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, "site", "sites", "system", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: PIE word *swésōr From Middle English sister, suster, from Old English swustor, sweoster, sweostor (“sister, nun”); from Proto-Germanic *swestēr (“sister”), from Proto-Indo-European *swésōr (“sister”). Doublet of soror. Cognate with Scots sister, syster (“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 sister, spelled S-I-S-T-E-R, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1A daughter of the same parents as another person; a female sibling.
- 2A female member of a religious order; especially one devoted to more active service; (informal) a nun.
- 3Any butterfly in the genus Adelpha, so named for the resemblance of the dark-colored wings to the black habit traditionally worn by nuns.
- 4A senior or supervisory nurse, often in a hospital.
- 5Any woman or girl with whom a bond is felt through the same biological sex, gender or common membership in a community, race, profession, religion, organization, or ism.
- 6A black woman.
- 7A form of address to a woman.
- 8A female fellow member of a religious community, church, trades union etc.
- 9An entity that has a special or affectionate, non-hierarchical relationship with another.
- 10A node in a data structure that shares its parent with another node.
- 11Something in the same class.
- 12One of two tornados that form in close proximity at the same time or in quick succession.
Etymology
PIE word *swésōr From Middle English sister, suster, from Old English swustor, sweoster, sweostor (“sister, nun”); from Proto-Germanic *swestēr (“sister”), from Proto-Indo-European *swésōr (“sister”). Doublet of soror. Cognate with Scots sister, syster (“sister”), West Frisian sus, suster (“sister”), Dutch zuster (“sister”), German Schwester (“sister”), Norwegian Bokmål søster (“sister”), Norwegian Nynorsk and Swedish syster (“sister”), Icelandic systir (“sister”), Gothic 𐍃𐍅𐌹𐍃𐍄𐌰𐍂 (swistar, “sister”), Latin soror (“sister”), Russian сестра́ (sestrá, “sister”), Lithuanian sesuo (“sister”), Albanian vajzë (“girl, maiden”), Sanskrit स्वसृ (svásṛ, “sister”), Persian خواهر (xâhar, “sister”). In standard English, the form with i is due to contamination with Old Norse systir (“sister”). The plural sistren is from Middle English sistren, a variant plural of sister, suster (“sister”); compare brethren. The sense for "Adelpha-genus butterfly" is a semantic loan from translingual Adelpha, itself from Ancient Greek ἀδελφή (adelphḗ, “sister”).
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: isster,sisetr,sisster,sisterr,sistre,sistter,sitser,ssister,ssiter
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for sister
Misspelling Variants of "sister"
Frequency rank: #1,207 in English
Frequently Asked Questions
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter S in our English index: