street
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
Letters
6 characters
Language
English
word origin
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "street", 6-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 "street" 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 "street" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
street is aEnglishnoun. It means: A paved part of road, usually in a village or a town. Pronounced /stɹiːt/. It ranks #535 in English word frequency. Often confused with sweet and strut.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | street |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /stɹiːt/ |
| Letters | 6 |
| Frequency rank | #535 |
| Misspellings tracked | 9 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for street is 6 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /stɹiːt/. Corpus data places it at rank #535 in overall English word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language.Wiktionary records 13 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 9 documented wrong-spelling variants for street, with forms such as "srteet", "sstreet", and "steret". 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, "sweet", "strut", "strep", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English strete, from Anglian Old English strēt (“street”) (cognate West Saxon Old English strǣt) from Proto-West Germanic *strātu (“street”), an early borrowing from Late Latin (via) strāta (“paved (road)”), from Latin strātus, past participle o… 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 street, spelled S-T-R-E-E-T, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1A paved part of road, usually in a village or a town.
- 2A road as above, but including the sidewalks (pavements) and buildings.
- 3The roads that run perpendicular to avenues in a grid layout.
- 4Metonymic senses:
- 5Metonymic senses:
- 6Metonymic senses:
- 7Metonymic senses:
- 8Living in the streets.
- 9Streetwise slang.
- 10People in general, as a source of information.
- 11A great distance.
- 12Each of the three opportunities that players have to bet, after the flop, turn and river.
- 13A style of skateboarding featuring typically urban obstacles.
Etymology
From Middle English strete, from Anglian Old English strēt (“street”) (cognate West Saxon Old English strǣt) from Proto-West Germanic *strātu (“street”), an early borrowing from Late Latin (via) strāta (“paved (road)”), from Latin strātus, past participle of sternō (“stretch out, spread, bestrew with, cover, pave”), from Proto-Indo-European *sterh₃- (“to stretch out, extend, spread”). The /aː/ vowel of the Latin form shifted by Anglo-Frisian brightening to /æː/ in West Saxon and /eː/ in Anglian Old English; these developed respectively to /ɛː/ and /eː/ in Middle English, /ɛː/ and /iː/ in Early Modern English, and finally /iː/ in Modern English by the Great Vowel Shift. The modern spelling reflects the Anglian form, as in sleep, greedy, sheep. Cognates Cognate with Scots stret, strete, streit (“street”), North Frisian Straat, stroot, struat (“street”) (North Frisian forms are borrowed from Middle Low German strâte), Saterland Frisian Sträite (“street”), West Frisian strjitte (“street”), Bavarian Stråßn (“street”), Dutch straat (“street”) (see doublet straat), German Strasse, Straße (“street”), German Low German Straat, Straote (“street”), Limburgish sjtraot, straot (“street”), Luxembourgish Strooss (“street”), Mòcheno stros (“street”), Vilamovian śtrös, štrȫs (“street”), Yiddish שטראָז (shtroz, “street”), Danish stræde (“alley, lane, narrow street”), Faroese, Icelandic stræti (“street”), Norwegian Bokmål strede (“narrow street”), Swedish stråt (“path, road, route; way, course”) (Scandinavian forms are borrowed from Old English), Portuguese estrada (“road, way, drive”), Italian strada (“road, street”). Related to Old English strēowian, strewian (“to strew, scatter”), Latin sternō, Ancient Greek στορνύναι (stornúnai). More at strew.
Synonyms
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: srteet,sstreet,steret,streett,stret,strete,strreet,sttreet,tsreet
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for street
Misspelling Variants of "street"
Frequency rank: #535 in English
Frequently Asked Questions
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter S in our English index: