staff
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 "staff", 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 "staff" 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 "staff" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
staff is aEnglishnoun. It means: A long, straight, thick wooden rod or stick, especially one used to assist in walking. Pronounced /stɑːf/. It ranks #888 in English word frequency. Often confused with stay and star.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | staff |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /stɑːf/ |
| Letters | 5 |
| Frequency rank | #888 |
| Misspellings tracked | 6 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for staff is 5 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /stɑːf/. Corpus data places it at rank #888 in overall English word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language.Wiktionary records 12 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 staff, with forms such as "satff", "sstaff", and "staf". 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, "stay", "star", "stan", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English staf, from Old English stæf (“letter of the alphabet”), from Proto-West Germanic *stab, from Proto-Germanic *stabaz. Cognate with Dutch staf, German Stab, Swedish stav. Sense of "group of military officers that assists a commander" and s… 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 staff, spelled S-T-A-F-F, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1A long, straight, thick wooden rod or stick, especially one used to assist in walking.
- 2A series of horizontal lines on which musical notes are written; a stave.
- 3The employees of a business.
- 4A mixture of plaster and fibre used as a temporary exterior wall covering.ᵂ
- 5A pole, stick, or wand borne as an ensign of authority; a badge of office.
- 6A pole upon which a flag is supported and displayed.
- 7The rung of a ladder.
- 8A series of verses so disposed that, when it is concluded, the same order begins again; a stanza; a stave.
- 9An arbor, as of a wheel or a pinion of a watch.
- 10The grooved director for the gorget, or knife, used in cutting for stone in the bladder.
- 11An establishment of officers in various departments attached to an army, to a section of an army, or to the commander of an army. The general's staff consists of those officers about his person who are employed in carrying his commands into execution.
- 12A form of token once used, in combination with a ticket, for safe train movements between two points on a single line.
Etymology
From Middle English staf, from Old English stæf (“letter of the alphabet”), from Proto-West Germanic *stab, from Proto-Germanic *stabaz. Cognate with Dutch staf, German Stab, Swedish stav. Sense of "group of military officers that assists a commander" and similar meanings, attested from 1702, is influenced by or is even from German Stab.
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: satff,sstaff,staf,stfaf,sttaff,tsaff
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for staff
Misspelling Variants of "staff"
Frequency rank: #888 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter S in our English index: