spare

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for spare is 5 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /spɛə(ɹ)/. Corpus data places it at rank #4,490 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 8 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 spare, with forms such as "psare", "sapre", and "spaer". 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, "SPR", "sure", "star", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English spare, spar, from Old English spær (“sparing, scant”), from Proto-Germanic *sparaz, from Proto-Indo-European *sph₁rós, from the root *speh₁-. Compare Dutch spaar(zaam), German spar(sam) and spär(lich), Swedish spar(sam), Icelandic sparr … 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 spare, spelled S-P-A-R-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.