take leave

verb

"take-leave" is a 9-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.

The verdict

“take leave” is uncommon English (outside the top frequency list), classed as a verb. The kind of spelling people second-guess.

Unranked
below top-frequency English
10
letters

According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see take, leave.

Corpus desk

Index EN-take-leave · take leave · English

take leave · unranked · 0 variants · 0 confusables

  • FREQ-UNRANKED Unranked
  • LEN-MEGA 10 letters
  • VOW-5 5 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.

Key facts for take leave
PropertyValue
Headwordtake leave
LanguageEnglish
Part of speechVerb
Letters10
Misspellings tracked0
Confusable pairs0
SourceWiktionary (kaikki.org)

Long-tail rank of “take leave” in English

take leavesits beyond the 100,000 most-frequent English words, in the long tail of technical, archaic, or otherwise rare vocabulary where spelling doubt tends to strike hardest.

Beyond rank #100,000. Source: FrequencyWords open word-frequency list.

Rare enough to double-check

take leave is uncommon English outside the top frequency list, classed as averb. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. 2 senses are on record.

take leave doesn't appear in our generated misspelling index, typically a sign the spelling maps closely to how the word sounds. No close-neighbour confusable shows up for this headword in our dataset, since nothing in our dataset looks or sounds close enough to cause mix-ups.

Our source data has no etymology on file for this entry, 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 leave, spelled T-A-K-E- -L-E-A-V-E.

Definition

  1. 1
    Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see take, leave.
  2. 2
    To depart.

Recorded use

Wiktionary examples

These source excerpts show how take leave appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.

  1. Romney had already taken leave from Bain Capital by the time the American Pad & Paper layoffs took place.
  2. So after learning a great deal about iron founding and much more about pike fishing, one regretfully took leave of a shop full of kindly characters and proceeded to a worse lot of odours in the brass foundry.

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.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do you spell "take leave"?
"take leave" is spelled T-A-K-E- -L-E-A-V-E.
What does "take leave" mean?
As a verb, "take leave" means: Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see take, leave.
What language does "take leave" come from?
"take leave" is a English word. PlainSpell covers definitions, pronunciations, and spelling data across English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and German.
Is PlainSpell free to use?
Yes, PlainSpell is a completely free word reference. You can look up definitions, pronunciations, confusable pairs, homophones, and spelling corrections across 5 languages without any sign-up or subscription.

Source: Wiktionary (via kaikki.org) Structured Wiktionary extract

Source: FrequencyWords open word-frequency list