spoon
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
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5 characters
Language
English
word origin
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "spoon", 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 "spoon" 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 "spoon" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
spoon is aEnglishnoun. It means: An implement for eating or serving; a scooped utensil whose long handle is straight, in contrast to a ladle. Pronounced /spuːn/. It ranks #8,611 in English word frequency. Often confused with spot and spun.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | spoon |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /spuːn/ |
| Letters | 5 |
| Frequency rank | #8,611 |
| Misspellings tracked | 7 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for spoon is 5 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /spuːn/. Corpus data places it at rank #8,611 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 11 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 spoon, with forms such as "psoon", "sopon", and "spon". 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, "spot", "spun", "sport", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English spoon, spoune, spone, spon (“spoon, chip of wood”), from Old English spōn (“sliver, chip of wood, shaving”), from Proto-West Germanic *spānu, from Proto-Germanic *spēnuz (“chip, flake, shaving”), from Proto-Indo-European *(s)peH- (“chip,… 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 spoon, spelled S-P-O-O-N, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1An implement for eating or serving; a scooped utensil whose long handle is straight, in contrast to a ladle.
- 2An implement for stirring food while being prepared; a wooden spoon.
- 3A measure that will fit into a spoon; a spoonful.
- 4A wooden-headed golf club with moderate loft, similar to the modern fairway wood.
- 5An oar.
- 6A type of metal lure resembling the concave head of a tablespoon.
- 7A spoon excavator.
- 8A South African shrub of the genus Spatalla.
- 9A simpleton, a spoony.
- 10A safety handle on a hand grenade, a trigger.
- 11A metaphoric unit of finite physical and mental energy available for daily activities, especially in the context of living with chronic illness or disability.
Etymology
From Middle English spoon, spoune, spone, spon (“spoon, chip of wood”), from Old English spōn (“sliver, chip of wood, shaving”), from Proto-West Germanic *spānu, from Proto-Germanic *spēnuz (“chip, flake, shaving”), from Proto-Indo-European *(s)peH- (“chip, shaving, log, length of wood”). Cognate with Scots spun, spon (“spoon, shingle”), West Frisian spoen (“chip”), Dutch spaan (“chip, flinders”), German Span (“chip, flake, shaving”), Swedish spån (“chip, flake”), Norwegian Nynorsk spon (“chip, spoon”), Faroese spónur (“wood chip; spoon”), Ancient Greek σφήν (sphḗn, “wedge”)(though the connection to the Greek is likely impossible by modern reconstructions of PIE). Eclipsed non-native Middle English cuculer, coclear (“spoon”), from Old English cuculer, cuceler, cucler, borrowed from Latin cochlear (“spoon”). The "metaphoric unit of personal energy" sense was coined by writer and disability advocate Christine Miserandino in 2003 (see spoon theory).
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: psoon,sopon,spon,spono,spoonn,sppoon,sspoon
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for spoon
Misspelling Variants of "spoon"
Frequency rank: #8,611 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter S in our English index: