source
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
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6 characters
Language
English
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Source
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "source", 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 "source" 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 "source" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
source is aEnglishnoun. It means: The person, place, or thing from which something (information, goods, etc.) comes or is acquired. Pronounced /sɔːs/. It ranks #743 in English word frequency. Often confused with sure and surge.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | source |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /sɔːs/ |
| Letters | 6 |
| Frequency rank | #743 |
| Misspellings tracked | 8 |
| Confusable pairs | 10 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for source is 6 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /sɔːs/. Corpus data places it at rank #743 in overall English word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language.Wiktionary records 7 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 8 documented wrong-spelling variants for source, with forms such as "osurce", "soruce", and "soucre". 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 10 confusable-pair relationships, "sure", "surge", "sources", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English sours, from Old French sorse (“rise, beginning, spring, source”), from sors, past participle of sordre, sourdre, from Latin surgō (“to rise”), which is composed of sub- (“up from below”) + regō (“lead, rule”), ultimately from Proto-Indo-… 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 source, spelled S-O-U-R-C-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1The person, place, or thing from which something (information, goods, etc.) comes or is acquired.
- 2Spring; fountainhead; wellhead; any collection of water on or under the surface of the ground in which a stream originates.
- 3A reporter's informant.
- 4Source code.
- 5The name of one terminal of a field effect transistor (FET).
- 6A node in a directed graph whose edges all go out from it; one with no entering edges.
- 7The domain of a function; the object which a morphism points from.
Etymology
From Middle English sours, from Old French sorse (“rise, beginning, spring, source”), from sors, past participle of sordre, sourdre, from Latin surgō (“to rise”), which is composed of sub- (“up from below”) + regō (“lead, rule”), ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *h₃réǵeti (“to straighten; right”), from the root *h₃reǵ-. Doublet of surge.
Synonyms
Antonyms
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: osurce,soruce,soucre,sourcce,sourec,sourrce,ssource,suorce
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for source
Misspelling Variants of "source"
Frequency rank: #743 in English
Frequently Asked Questions
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter S in our English index: