spit
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
Letters
4 characters
Language
English
word origin
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "spit", 4-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 "spit" 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 "spit" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
spit is aEnglishnoun. It means: A thin metal or wooden rod on which meat is skewered for cooking, often over a fire. Pronounced /spɪt/. It ranks #8,987 in English word frequency. Often confused with spy and STI.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | spit |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /spɪt/ |
| Letters | 4 |
| Frequency rank | #8,987 |
| Misspellings tracked | 6 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for spit is 4 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /spɪt/. Corpus data places it at rank #8,987 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 2 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 6 documented wrong-spelling variants for spit, with forms such as "psit", "sipt", and "spitt". 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, "spy", "STI", "Sui", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: The noun is from Middle English spit, spite, spete, spette, spyte, spytte (“rod on which meat is cooked; rod used as a torture instrument; short spear; point of a spear; spine in the fin of a fish; pointed object; dagger symbol; land projecting into the sea… 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 spit, spelled S-P-I-T, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1A thin metal or wooden rod on which meat is skewered for cooking, often over a fire.
- 2A generally low, narrow, pointed, usually sandy peninsula or bar.
Etymology
The noun is from Middle English spit, spite, spete, spette, spyte, spytte (“rod on which meat is cooked; rod used as a torture instrument; short spear; point of a spear; spine in the fin of a fish; pointed object; dagger symbol; land projecting into the sea”), from Old English spitu (“rod on which meat is cooked; spit”), from Proto-Germanic *spitō (“rod; skewer; spike”), *spituz (“rod on which meat is cooked; stick”), from Proto-Indo-European *speyd-, *spey- (“sharp; sharp stick”). The English word is cognate with Dutch spit, Low German Spitt (“pike, spear; spike; skewer; spit”), Danish spid, Swedish spett (“skewer; spit; type of crowbar”). The verb is derived from the noun, or from Middle English spiten (“to put on a spit; to impale”), from spit, spite: see above. The English verb is cognate with Middle Dutch speten, spitten (modern Dutch speten), Middle Low German speten (Low German spitten, modern German spießen (“to skewer, to spear”), spissen (now dialectal)) and Danish spidde.
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: psit,sipt,spitt,sppit,spti,sspit
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for spit
Misspelling Variants of "spit"
Frequency rank: #8,987 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter S in our English index: