son
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
Letters
3 characters
Language
English
word origin
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "son", 3-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 "son" 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 "son" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
son is aEnglishnoun. It means: One's male offspring. Pronounced /sʌn/. It ranks #534 in English word frequency. Often confused with SS and SP.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | son |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /sʌn/ |
| Letters | 3 |
| Frequency rank | #534 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for son is 3 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /sʌn/. Corpus data places it at rank #534 in overall English word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language.Wiktionary records 8 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
No frequent misspelling variants are recorded for son in our index, suggesting the orthography either follows predictable English patterns or the word is uncommon enough that typo corpora lack signal.It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "SS", "SP", "su", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English sonn, sone, sun, sune, from Old English sunu (“son”), from Proto-West Germanic *sunu, from Proto-Germanic *sunuz (“son”), from Proto-Indo-European *suHnús (“son”), from Proto-Indo-European *sewH- (“to bear; give birth”). 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 son, spelled S-O-N, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1One's male offspring.
- 2A male adopted person in relation to his adoptive parents.
- 3A male person who has such a close relationship with an older or otherwise more authoritative person that he can be regarded as a son of the other person.
- 4A male person considered to have been significantly shaped by social conflict.
- 5A person regarded as the product of some place.
- 6A familiar address to a male person from an older or otherwise more authoritative person.
- 7An informal address to a friend or person of equal authority.
- 8The current version of a file, derived from the preceding father file.
Etymology
From Middle English sonn, sone, sun, sune, from Old English sunu (“son”), from Proto-West Germanic *sunu, from Proto-Germanic *sunuz (“son”), from Proto-Indo-European *suHnús (“son”), from Proto-Indo-European *sewH- (“to bear; give birth”).
This word in other languages
Frequency rank: #534 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter S in our English index: