take by surprise
"take-by-surprise" is a 14-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“take by surprise” is uncommon English (outside the top frequency list), classed as a verb. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency English
- 16
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - To occur to someone when unexpected; to surprise.
Corpus desk
Index EN-take-by-surprise · take by surprise · English
take by surprise · unranked · 0 variants · 0 confusables
- FREQ-UNRANKED Unranked
- LEN-MEGA 16 letters
- VOW-6 6 vowels
- CONFUS-0 No pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-THIN "T" thin
- PHOTO-UNK Peer pending
Read with this headword: Spelling guide for this pattern
Desk codes from Wiktionary headword shape, FrequencyWords rank tier, confusable-pair count, generated misspelling depth, letter-cohort book size, and photo-finish peer. Not a difficulty grade.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | take by surprise |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Verb |
| Letters | 16 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Long-tail rank of “take by surprise” in English
Rare enough to double-check
take by surprise is uncommon English outside the top frequency list, classed as averb. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. Gloss: "To occur to someone when unexpected; to surprise.".
No generated misspelling entries exist for take by surprise in our index, and the word's spelling is regular enough that our generator found nothing worth flagging. Our confusable-pair dataset has no match for it, since nothing in our dataset looks or sounds close enough to cause mix-ups.
Wiktionary doesn't record an etymology for this headword, so spelling patterns must be inferred from the word's phoneme-to-grapheme mapping rather than from a documented borrowing chain. The correct English form is take by surprise, spelled T-A-K-E- -B-Y- -S-U-R-P-R-I-S-E.
Definition
- 1To occur to someone when unexpected; to surprise.
Recorded use
Wiktionary examplesThese source excerpts show how take by surprise appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
Kazakhstan's shooting team was taken by surprise when a spoof national anthem from the film Borat was used at a medal ceremony in Kuwait.
Both the South Korean government and US forces in the region appear to have been taken by surprise by Trump’s declared suspension of joint exercises.
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.