soreness
"soreness" is a 8-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“soreness” is a moderately-common English word, ranked #29,097 in English word frequency and used as a noun.
- #29,097
- frequency rank, English
- 8
- letters
- 10
- tracked misspellings
- 4
- confusable pairs
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed May 6, 2026) - The property, state, or condition of being sore; painfulness.
Visual similarity to commonly confused words
How many letter changes separate each confused pair (Levenshtein distance, normalized).
Source: PlainSpell confusable corpus (Wiktionary, CC BY-SA).
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | soreness |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| Letters | 8 |
| Frequency rank | #29,097 |
| Misspellings tracked | 10 |
| Confusable pairs | 4 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Where “soreness” sits in English frequency
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for soreness is 8 letters long, classified as a noun. Corpus data places it at rank #29,097 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it. The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "The property, state, or condition of being sore; painfulness.".
Our generated misspelling index lists 10 likely wrong-spelling variants for soreness, with forms such as "osreness", "soerness", and "soreenss". Each of these forms differs from the correct spelling by one small edit: a doubled letter, a dropped silent letter, or a substituted vowel. It also participates in 4 confusable-pair relationships, "softness", "scoreless", "shortness", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English sornes, sornesse, sarnesse, from Old English sārnes (“bodily pain; mental pain, affliction, grief”), from Proto-West Germanic *sairanassī, equivalent to sore + -ness. Cognate with Scots sairness (“soreness”), Old Frisian sērnisse, sērnes… The correct English form is soreness, spelled S-O-R-E-N-E-S-S.
Definition
- 1The property, state, or condition of being sore; painfulness.
Etymology
From Middle English sornes, sornesse, sarnesse, from Old English sārnes (“bodily pain; mental pain, affliction, grief”), from Proto-West Germanic *sairanassī, equivalent to sore + -ness. Cognate with Scots sairness (“soreness”), Old Frisian sērnisse, sērnesse (“injury, lesion”), Middle Low German sêrnisse, sêrenisse (“wounding, injury, distress, need”).
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: osreness,soerness,soreenss,sorenes,sorenness,sorenses,sorneess,sorreness,sroeness,ssoreness
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
How far each generated variant is from the correct spelling of soreness - measured in single-character edits (insert, delete, or substitute a letter). Larger bars are easier to catch; one-edit slips are the sneakiest.
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA); frequency ordering uses the FrequencyWords open word-frequency list (2018 English corpus, MIT). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Using “soreness”
The practical upshot for anyone who landed here from a spell-check.
- The one correct English spelling is S-O-R-E-N-E-S-S - every other letter order is a misspelling in standard orthography.
- Don't mix it up with “softness” - see the side-by-side comparison. soreness vs softness
- Browse more English words and confusable pairs in the same reference. English words
Data Source
Wiktionary (via kaikki.org), licensed under CC BY-SA & GFDL. Word ordering uses an open word-frequency list; misspelling variants are generated by edit-distance from the correct headword.