suicide
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
Letters
7 characters
Language
English
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "suicide", 7-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 "suicide" 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 "suicide" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
suicide is aEnglishnoun. It means: The act of intentionally killing oneself. Pronounced /ˈs(j)uːɪˌsaɪd/. It ranks #2,409 in English word frequency. Often confused with sulfide and subside.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | suicide |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /ˈs(j)uːɪˌsaɪd/ |
| Letters | 7 |
| Frequency rank | #2,409 |
| Misspellings tracked | 9 |
| Confusable pairs | 3 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for suicide is 7 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈs(j)uːɪˌsaɪd/. Corpus data places it at rank #2,409 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 9 documented wrong-spelling variants for suicide, with forms such as "siucide", "ssuicide", and "suciide". 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 3 confusable-pair relationships, "sulfide", "subside", "suicidal", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: First attested in Thomas Browne's Religio Medici (1643) in noun sense 1, ostensibly from New Latin suīcīdium, from suī (genitive reflexive pronoun) + -cīdium (“act of killing or murder”), but often believed to have originated in English before entering Lati… 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 suicide, spelled S-U-I-C-I-D-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1The act of intentionally killing oneself.
- 2A particular instance of a person intentionally killing oneself, or of multiple people doing so.
- 3A person who has intentionally killed themself.
- 4An action that could cause the literal or figurative death of a person or organization, although death is not the aim of the action.
- 5A beverage combining all available flavors at a soda fountain.
- 6A diabolo trick where one of the sticks is released and allowed to rotate 360° round the diabolo until it is caught by the hand that released it.
- 7A run comprising a series of sprints of increasing lengths, each followed immediately by a return to the start, with no pause between one sprint and the next.
- 8A children's game of throwing a ball against a wall and at other players, who are eliminated by being struck.
- 9Pertaining to a suicide bombing.
Etymology
First attested in Thomas Browne's Religio Medici (1643) in noun sense 1, ostensibly from New Latin suīcīdium, from suī (genitive reflexive pronoun) + -cīdium (“act of killing or murder”), but often believed to have originated in English before entering Latin. Displaced native Middle English seolf-cwale from Old English selfcwalu (literally “self-slaughter”), after which suicide may have been modelled, or calqued (compare manuscript). Noun sense 3 is perhaps by analogy with words like homicide, patricide (see -cide), or, although unlikely, from Medieval Latin suīcīda; see the Etymology section at suīcīdium.
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: siucide,ssuicide,suciide,suiccide,suicdie,suicidde,suicied,suiicde,usicide
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for suicide
Misspelling Variants of "suicide"
Frequency rank: #2,409 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter S in our English index: