spray
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 "spray", 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 "spray" 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 "spray" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
spray is aEnglishnoun. It means: A fine, gentle, dispersed mist of liquid. Pronounced /spɹeɪ/. It ranks #5,368 in English word frequency. Often confused with spy and sry.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | spray |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /spɹeɪ/ |
| Letters | 5 |
| Frequency rank | #5,368 |
| Misspellings tracked | 8 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for spray is 5 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /spɹeɪ/. Corpus data places it at rank #5,368 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 8 documented wrong-spelling variants for spray, with forms such as "psray", "spary", and "sppray". 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", "sry", "stay", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle Dutch sprāien, sprayen, spraeyen (“to spray, sprinkle, spread”), ultimately from Proto-Germanic *sprēwijaną (“to spray, sprinkle”), from Proto-Indo-European *(s)per- (“to sow, scatter”). Cognate with Middle High German spræjen, spræwen (“to squi… 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 spray, spelled S-P-R-A-Y, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1A fine, gentle, dispersed mist of liquid.
- 2Something resembling a spray of liquid.
- 3A pressurized container; an atomizer.
- 4Any of numerous commercial products, including paints, cosmetics, and insecticides, that are dispensed from containers in this manner.
- 5A jet of fine medicated vapour, used either as an application to a diseased part or to charge the air of a room with a disinfectant or a deodorizer.
- 6A side channel or branch of the runner of a flask, made to distribute the metal to all parts of the mold.
- 7A group of castings made in the same mold and connected by sprues formed in the runner and its branches.
- 8The allocation and filling of blocks of memory with the same byte sequence, hoping to establish that sequence in a certain predetermined location as part of an exploit.
- 9A loud scolding or reprimand, usually delivered by a sports coach or similar figure.
Etymology
From Middle Dutch sprāien, sprayen, spraeyen (“to spray, sprinkle, spread”), ultimately from Proto-Germanic *sprēwijaną (“to spray, sprinkle”), from Proto-Indo-European *(s)per- (“to sow, scatter”). Cognate with Middle High German spræjen, spræwen (“to squirt, spray, dust, splash, straw”), Danish dialectal språe (“to open up, burst forth”), Swedish dialectal språ (“to sprout, shoot forth, burst”), Norwegian dialectal spra, spræ (“to splash, splatter, spout, burst forth”), Dutch sproeien (“to spray, sprinkle”), German sprühen (“to spray, sparkle”).
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: psray,spary,sppray,sprayy,sprray,sprya,srpay,sspray
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for spray
Misspelling Variants of "spray"
Frequency rank: #5,368 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter S in our English index: