smear

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for smear is 5 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /smɪə(ɹ)/. Corpus data places it at rank #15,912 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 12 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 smear, with forms such as "msear", "semar", and "smaer". 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, "star", "soar", "spar", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English smeren, smerien, from Old English smerian, smyrian, smierwan (“to anoint or rub with grease, oil, etc.”), from Proto-West Germanic *smirwijan, from Proto-Germanic *smirwijaną. Doublet of schmear. Cognate with Saterland Frisian smeere, Du… 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 smear, spelled S-M-E-A-R, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.