sphere
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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Detailed reference entry for the English word "sphere", 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 "sphere" 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 "sphere" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
sphere is aEnglishnoun. It means: A surface in three dimensions consisting of all points equidistant from a center. . Pronounced /sfɪə(ɹ)/. It ranks #8,208 in English word frequency. Often confused with spree and spire.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | sphere |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /sfɪə(ɹ)/ |
| Letters | 6 |
| Frequency rank | #8,208 |
| Misspellings tracked | 9 |
| Confusable pairs | 11 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for sphere is 6 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /sfɪə(ɹ)/. Corpus data places it at rank #8,208 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 9 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 9 documented wrong-spelling variants for sphere, with forms such as "pshere", "shpere", and "spehre". 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 11 confusable-pair relationships, "spree", "spire", "spore", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English spere, from Old French sphere, from Late Latin sphēra, earlier Latin sphaera (“ball, globe, celestial sphere”), from Ancient Greek σφαῖρα (sphaîra, “ball, globe”), of unknown origin. Not related to superficially similar Persian سپهر (sep… 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 sphere, spelled S-P-H-E-R-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1A surface in three dimensions consisting of all points equidistant from a center. .
- 2An object which appears to be bounded by a sphere; a round object, a ball.
- 3The celestial sphere: the edge of the heavens, imagined as a hollow globe within which celestial bodies appear to be embedded.
- 4Any of the concentric hollow transparent globes formerly believed to rotate around the Earth, and which carried the heavenly bodies; there were originally believed to be eight, and later nine and ten; friction between them was thought to cause a harmonious sound (the music of the spheres).
- 5An area of activity for a planet; or by extension, an area of influence for a god, hero etc.
- 6The region in which something or someone is active; one's province, domain.
- 7The natural, normal, or proper place (of something).
- 8The set of all points in three-dimensional Euclidean space (or n-dimensional space, in topology) that are a fixed distance from a fixed point .
- 9The domain of reference of a proposition, subject, or predicate, or the totality of the particular subjects to which it applies.
Etymology
From Middle English spere, from Old French sphere, from Late Latin sphēra, earlier Latin sphaera (“ball, globe, celestial sphere”), from Ancient Greek σφαῖρα (sphaîra, “ball, globe”), of unknown origin. Not related to superficially similar Persian سپهر (sepehr, “sky”) .
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: pshere,shpere,spehre,spheer,spherre,sphhere,sphree,spphere,ssphere
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for sphere
Misspelling Variants of "sphere"
Frequency rank: #8,208 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter S in our English index: