somber
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
Letters
6 characters
Language
English
word origin
Source
Wiktionary
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "somber", 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 "somber" 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 "somber" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
somber is anEnglishadj. It means: US standard spelling of sombre. Pronounced /ˈsɑmbɚ/. Often confused with some and Somme.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | somber |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Adj |
| IPA | /ˈsɑmbɚ/ |
| Letters | 6 |
| Frequency rank | #27,291 |
| Misspellings tracked | 8 |
| Confusable pairs | 19 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for somber is 6 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈsɑmbɚ/. Corpus data places it at rank #27,291 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "US standard spelling of sombre.".
Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 8 documented wrong-spelling variants for somber, with forms such as "osmber", "smober", and "sobmer". 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 19 confusable-pair relationships, "some", "Somme", "summer", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
No explicit etymology string is stored for this entry, so spelling patterns must be inferred from the word's phoneme-to-grapheme mapping rather than from a documented borrowing chain. For readers arriving here from a spelling check, the authoritative guidance is: the correct English form is somber, spelled S-O-M-B-E-R, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1US standard spelling of sombre.
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: osmber,smober,sobmer,sombber,somberr,somebr,sommber,ssomber
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for somber
Misspelling Variants of "somber"
Frequency rank: #27,291 in English
Frequently Asked Questions
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter S in our English index: