spider
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
Letters
6 characters
Language
English
word origin
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "spider", 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 "spider" 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 "spider" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
spider is aEnglishnoun. It means: Any of various eight-legged, predatory arthropods, of the order Araneae, most of which spin webs to catch prey. Pronounced /ˈspaɪ̯də/. It ranks #4,715 in English word frequency. Often confused with spite and spike.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | spider |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /ˈspaɪ̯də/ |
| Letters | 6 |
| Frequency rank | #4,715 |
| Misspellings tracked | 9 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for spider is 6 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈspaɪ̯də/. Corpus data places it at rank #4,715 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 20 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 spider, with forms such as "psider", "sipder", and "spdier". 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, "spite", "spike", "spine", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English spiþre, spydyr, spider, spiþer, from Old English spīþra (“spider”), from Proto-West Germanic *spinþrijō, from Proto-Germanic *spinnaną (“to spin”). Mostly displaced attercop (“spider, unpleasant person”), now a dialectal term. Compare ty… 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 spider, spelled S-P-I-D-E-R, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1Any of various eight-legged, predatory arthropods, of the order Araneae, most of which spin webs to catch prey.
- 2A program which follows links on the World Wide Web in order to gather information.
- 3A float (drink) made by mixing ice-cream and a soda or fizzy drink (such as lemonade).
- 4An alcoholic drink made with brandy and lemonade or ginger beer.
- 5A spindly person.
- 6A man who persistently approaches or accosts a woman in a public social setting, particularly in a bar.
- 7A stick with a convex arch-shaped notched head used to support the cue when the cue ball is out of reach at normal extension.
- 8A cast-iron frying pan with three legs, once common in open-hearth cookery.
- 9Implement for moving food in and out of hot oil for deep frying, with a circular metal mesh attached to a long handle; a spider skimmer
- 10A part of a crank, to which the chainrings are attached.
- 11Heroin.
- 12Part of a resonator instrument that transmits string vibrations from the bridge to a resonator cone at multiple points.
- 13A skeleton or frame with radiating arms or members, often connected by crosspieces, such as a casting forming the hub and spokes to which the rim of a fly wheel or large gear is bolted; the body of a piston head; or a frame for strengthening a core or mould for a casting.
- 14A soft-hackle fly.
- 15The network of wires separating the areas of a dartboard.
- 16A spider graph or spider tree.
- 17A type of light phaeton.
- 18A support for a camera tripod, preventing it from sliding.
- 19A competition in which several participants are spread evenly around the edges of the green, who all make one bowl towards the central jack at the same time; the winner being the person whose bowl ends up closest to the jack.
- 20A bit for turning fasteners with 8-pointed heads.
Etymology
From Middle English spiþre, spydyr, spider, spiþer, from Old English spīþra (“spider”), from Proto-West Germanic *spinþrijō, from Proto-Germanic *spinnaną (“to spin”). Mostly displaced attercop (“spider, unpleasant person”), now a dialectal term. Compare typologically Proto-Slavic *mězgyrь (whence Russian мизги́рь (mizgírʹ)) (akin to Latvian mežģīt), Turkish örümcek (akin to örmek).
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: psider,sipder,spdier,spidder,spiderr,spidre,spiedr,sppider,sspider
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for spider
Misspelling Variants of "spider"
Frequency rank: #4,715 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter S in our English index: