slice
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
Letters
5 characters
Language
English
word origin
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "slice", 5-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 "slice" 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 "slice" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
slice is aEnglishnoun. It means: That which is thin and broad. Pronounced /slaɪs/. It ranks #7,180 in English word frequency. Often confused with slip and slim.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | slice |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /slaɪs/ |
| Letters | 5 |
| Frequency rank | #7,180 |
| Misspellings tracked | 7 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for slice is 5 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /slaɪs/. Corpus data places it at rank #7,180 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 17 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 7 documented wrong-spelling variants for slice, with forms such as "lsice", "silce", and "slcie". 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, "slip", "slim", "slid", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English sclise, sklise, from Old French esclice, esclis (“a piece split off”), deverbal of esclicer, esclicier (“to splinter, split up”), from Frankish *slitjan (“to split up”), from Proto-Germanic *slitjaną, from Proto-Germanic *slītaną (“to sp… 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 slice, spelled S-L-I-C-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1That which is thin and broad.
- 2A thin, broad piece cut off.
- 3An amount of anything.
- 4A piece of pizza, shaped like a sector of a circle.
- 5A snack consisting of pastry with savoury filling.
- 6A broad, thin piece of plaster.
- 7A knife with a thin, broad blade for taking up or serving fish; also, a spatula for spreading anything, as paint or ink.
- 8A salver, platter, or tray.
- 9A plate of iron with a handle, forming a kind of chisel, or a spadelike implement, variously proportioned, and used for various purposes, as for stripping the planking from a vessel's side, for cutting blubber from a whale, or for stirring a fire of coals; a slice bar; a peel; a fire shovel.
- 10One of the wedges by which the cradle and the ship are lifted clear of the building blocks to prepare for launching.
- 11A removable sliding bottom to a galley.
- 12A shot that (for the right-handed player) curves unintentionally to the right. See fade, hook, draw.
- 13A kind of cut shot where the bat makes an obtuse angle with the batter.
- 14Any of a class of heavy cakes or desserts made in a tray and cut out into squarish slices.
- 15A section of image taken of an internal organ using MRI (magnetic resonance imaging), CT (computed tomography), or various forms of x-ray.
- 16A hawk's or falcon's dropping which squirts at an angle other than vertical. (See mute.)
- 17A contiguous portion of an array.
Etymology
From Middle English sclise, sklise, from Old French esclice, esclis (“a piece split off”), deverbal of esclicer, esclicier (“to splinter, split up”), from Frankish *slitjan (“to split up”), from Proto-Germanic *slitjaną, from Proto-Germanic *slītaną (“to split, tear apart”), from Proto-Indo-European *sleyd- (“to rend, injure, crumble”). Akin to Old High German sliz, gisliz (“a tear, rip”), Old High German slīȥan (“to tear”), Old English slītan (“to split up”), modern French éclisse. More at slite, slit.
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: lsice,silce,slcie,slicce,sliec,sllice,sslice
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for slice
Misspelling Variants of "slice"
Frequency rank: #7,180 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter S in our English index: