speak
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
Letters
5 characters
Language
English
word origin
Source
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "speak", 5-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 "speak" 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 "speak" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
speak is aEnglishverb. It means: To communicate with one's voice, to say words out loud. Pronounced /spiːk/. It ranks #1,004 in English word frequency. Often confused with spec and sped.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | speak |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Verb |
| IPA | /spiːk/ |
| Letters | 5 |
| Frequency rank | #1,004 |
| Misspellings tracked | 7 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for speak is 5 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /spiːk/. Corpus data places it at rank #1,004 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 12 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 speak, with forms such as "pseak", "sepak", and "spaek". 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, "spec", "sped", "spew", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English speke, speken (“to speak”), from Old English specan (“to speak”). This is usually taken to be an irregular alteration of earlier sprecan, spreocan (“to speak”), from Proto-West Germanic *sprekan, from Proto-Germanic *sprekaną (“to speak,… 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 speak, spelled S-P-E-A-K, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1To communicate with one's voice, to say words out loud.
- 2To have a conversation.
- 3To communicate or converse by some means other than orally, such as writing or facial expressions.
- 4To deliver a message to a group; to deliver a speech.
- 5To be able to communicate in a language.
- 6To be able to communicate in a language.
- 7To utter.
- 8To communicate (some fact or feeling); to bespeak, to indicate.
- 9To understand (as though it were a language).
- 10To produce a sound; to sound.
- 11Of a bird, to be able to vocally reproduce words or phrases from a human language.
- 12To address; to accost; to speak to.
Etymology
From Middle English speke, speken (“to speak”), from Old English specan (“to speak”). This is usually taken to be an irregular alteration of earlier sprecan, spreocan (“to speak”), from Proto-West Germanic *sprekan, from Proto-Germanic *sprekaną (“to speak, make a sound”), from Proto-Indo-European *spreg- (“to make a sound, utter, speak”). Finding this proposed loss of r from the stable cluster spr unparalleled, Hill instead sets up a different root, Proto-West Germanic *spekan (“to negotiate”) from Proto-Indo-European *bʰégʾ-e- (“to distribute”) with *s-mobile, which collapsed in meaning with *sprekan ("to speak" < "to crackle, prattle") and so came to be seen as a free variant thereof. Cognates Cognate with Scots speak, speik (“to speak”), Saterland Frisian spreke (“to speak”), West Frisian sprekke (“to speak”), Central Franconian sjprèche (“to speak”), Dutch and Low German spreken (“to speak”), German sprechen (“to speak”), Luxembourgish spriechen (“to speak”), and also with Albanian shpreh (“to express, manifest, show”) through Indo-European.
Synonyms
Antonyms
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: pseak,sepak,spaek,speakk,speka,sppeak,sspeak
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for speak
Misspelling Variants of "speak"
Frequency rank: #1,004 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter S in our English index: