sport
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
Letters
5 characters
Language
English
word origin
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "sport", 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 "sport" 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 "sport" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
sport is aEnglishnoun. It means: Any activity that uses physical exertion or skills competitively under a set of rules that is not based on aesthetics. Pronounced /spɔːt/. It ranks #1,921 in English word frequency. Often confused with SPR and spot.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | sport |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /spɔːt/ |
| Letters | 5 |
| Frequency rank | #1,921 |
| Misspellings tracked | 8 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for sport is 5 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /spɔːt/. Corpus data places it at rank #1,921 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 14 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 8 documented wrong-spelling variants for sport, with forms such as "psort", "soprt", and "sporrt". 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, "SPR", "spot", "spur", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English sporten (“to divert, disport”, verb) and sport, spoort, sporte (noun), apheretic shortenings of disporten (verb) and disport, disporte (noun), from Old French desporter (“to divert, amuse, please, play; to seek amusement”), etymologicall… 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 sport, spelled S-P-O-R-T, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1Any activity that uses physical exertion or skills competitively under a set of rules that is not based on aesthetics.
- 2A person who exhibits either good or bad sportsmanship.
- 3Somebody who behaves or reacts in an admirably good-natured manner, e.g. to being teased or to losing a game; a good sport.
- 4Something fun, pastime; amusement.
- 5Mockery, making fun; derision.
- 6A toy; a plaything; an object of mockery.
- 7Gaming for money as in racing, hunting, or fishing.
- 8A plant or an animal, or part of a plant or animal, which has some peculiarity not usually seen in the species; an abnormal variety or growth. The term encompasses both mutants and organisms with non-genetic developmental abnormalities such as birth defects.
- 9A sportsman; a gambler.
- 10One who consorts with disreputable people, including prostitutes.
- 11An amorous dalliance.
- 12A friend or acquaintance (chiefly used when speaking to the friend in question)
- 13Term of endearment used by an adult for a child, usually a boy.
- 14Play; idle jingle.
Etymology
From Middle English sporten (“to divert, disport”, verb) and sport, spoort, sporte (noun), apheretic shortenings of disporten (verb) and disport, disporte (noun), from Old French desporter (“to divert, amuse, please, play; to seek amusement”), etymologically meaning "to carry away (the mind from serious matters)," from des- + porter, from Latin dis- + Latin portāre, ultimately from Latin deportāre, from de- + portāre, from Proto-Indo-European *per- (“to lead, pass over”)). Replaced native English laik, lake (“sport, fun, amusement”), and Middle English spile, spyl (“fun, sport, play”). More at disport. Doublet of disport and deport.
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: psort,soprt,sporrt,sportt,spotr,spport,sprot,ssport
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for sport
Misspelling Variants of "sport"
Frequency rank: #1,921 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter S in our English index: