terror
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
Letters
6 characters
Language
English
word origin
Source
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "terror", 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 "terror" 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 "terror" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
terror is aEnglishnoun. It means: Intense dread, fright, or fear. Pronounced /ˈtɛɹ.ɚ/. It ranks #4,637 in English word frequency. Often confused with terry and terra.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | terror |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /ˈtɛɹ.ɚ/ |
| Letters | 6 |
| Frequency rank | #4,637 |
| Misspellings tracked | 7 |
| Confusable pairs | 5 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for terror is 6 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈtɛɹ.ɚ/. Corpus data places it at rank #4,637 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 5 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 7 documented wrong-spelling variants for terror, with forms such as "etrror", "teror", and "terorr". 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 5 confusable-pair relationships, "terry", "terra", "tenor", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *tres- Proto-Indo-European *-yeti Proto-Indo-European *-éyeti Proto-Indo-European *troséyeti Proto-Italic *trozeō Latin terreō Proto-Indo-European *-os Proto-Indo-European *-s Proto-Indo-European *-ōs Proto-Italic *-ōs Lat… 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 terror, spelled T-E-R-R-O-R, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1Intense dread, fright, or fear.
- 2The action or quality of causing dread; terribleness, especially such qualities in narrative fiction.
- 3Something or someone that causes such fear.
- 4Terrorism.
- 5A night terror.
Etymology
Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *tres- Proto-Indo-European *-yeti Proto-Indo-European *-éyeti Proto-Indo-European *troséyeti Proto-Italic *trozeō Latin terreō Proto-Indo-European *-os Proto-Indo-European *-s Proto-Indo-European *-ōs Proto-Italic *-ōs Latin -or Latin terrorbor. Old French terreur Middle French terreurbor. Middle English terrour English terror From late Middle English terrour, from Old French terreur f (“terror, fear, dread”), from Latin terror m (“fright, fear, terror”), from terrēre (“to frighten, terrify”), from Old Latin tr̥reō, from Proto-Italic *trozeō, from Proto-Indo-European *tre- (“to shake”), *tres- (“to tremble”).
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: etrror,teror,terorr,terrorr,terrro,treror,tterror
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for terror
Misspelling Variants of "terror"
Frequency rank: #4,637 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter T in our English index: