tooth
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
Letters
5 characters
Language
English
word origin
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "tooth", 5-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 "tooth" 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 "tooth" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
tooth is aEnglishnoun. It means: A hard, calcareous structure present in the mouth of many vertebrate animals, generally used for biting and chewing food. Pronounced /tuːθ/. It ranks #6,305 in English word frequency. Often confused with tot and tote.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | tooth |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /tuːθ/ |
| Letters | 5 |
| Frequency rank | #6,305 |
| Misspellings tracked | 6 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for tooth is 5 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /tuːθ/. Corpus data places it at rank #6,305 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 6 documented wrong-spelling variants for tooth, with forms such as "ototh", "tooht", and "toothh". 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, "tot", "tote", "trot", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English tothe, toth, tooth, from Old English tōþ (“tooth”), from Proto-West Germanic *tanþ (“tooth”), from Proto-Germanic *tanþs (“tooth”), from Proto-Indo-European *h₃dónts (“tooth”). Related to tusk. Doublet of dent, dens, tind, and tine. Cogn… 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 tooth, spelled T-O-O-T-H, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1A hard, calcareous structure present in the mouth of many vertebrate animals, generally used for biting and chewing food.
- 2A sharp projection on the blade of a saw or similar implement.
- 3A projection on the edge of a gear that meshes with similar projections on adjacent gears, or on the circumference of a cog that engages with a chain.
- 4Of a rope, the stickiness when in contact with another rope as in a knot.
- 5A projection or point in other parts of the body resembling the tooth of a vertebrate animal.
- 6A pointed projection from the margin of a leaf.
- 7The rough surface of some kinds of cel or other films that allows better adhesion of artwork.
- 8Liking, fondness (compare toothsome).
- 9An irreducible component of a comb that intersects the handle in exactly one point, that point being distinct from the unique point of intersection for any other tooth of the comb.
Etymology
From Middle English tothe, toth, tooth, from Old English tōþ (“tooth”), from Proto-West Germanic *tanþ (“tooth”), from Proto-Germanic *tanþs (“tooth”), from Proto-Indo-European *h₃dónts (“tooth”). Related to tusk. Doublet of dent, dens, tind, and tine. Cognates Cognate with Scots tuith (“tooth”), North Frisian Ter, teän, tosch, toske, tuis, tus, tusch, täis (“tooth”), Saterland Frisian Tusk (“tooth”), West Frisian tosk (“tooth”), Bavarian Zåhn (“tooth”), Dutch tand (“tooth”), German Zahn (“tooth”), Limburgish tandj (“tooth”), Luxembourgish Zant (“tooth”), Vilamovian cōn (“tooth”), Yiddish צאָן (tson, “tooth”), Danish and Swedish tand (“tooth”), Faroese tonn (“tooth”), Icelandic tönn (“tooth”), Norn *tann, *tant (“tooth”), Norwegian Bokmål tann (“tooth”), Norwegian Nynorsk tann, tonn (“tooth”), Breton and Welsh dant (“tooth”), Cornish dans (“tooth”), Irish déad (“tooth”), Scottish Gaelic deud (“tooth”), Asturian, Leonese, Mirandese, and Spanish diente (“tooth”), Aragonese dien (“tooth”), Catalan and French dent (“tooth”), Galician, Italian, and Portuguese dente (“tooth”), Romanian dinte (“tooth”), Latin dēns (“tooth”), Ancient Greek ὀδούς (odoús), ὀδών (odṓn, “tooth”), Lithuanian dantis (“tooth”), Belarusian дзясна́ (dzjasná, “gum”), Bulgarian and Russian десна (desna, “gum”), Czech dáseň (“gum”), Polish dziąsło (“gum”), Serbo-Croatian dȇsni (“gum”), Slovak ďasno (“gum”), Slovene dlesni (“gum”), Ukrainian я́сна (jásna, “gum”), Armenian ատամ (atam, “tooth”), Ossetian дӕндаг (dændag, “tooth”), Baluchi دنتان (dantán), دتھاں (datʰāⁿ, “tooth”), Central Kurdish ددان (ddan, “tooth”), Northern Kurdish didan, diran (“tooth”), Persian دندان (dandân, “tooth”), Sanskrit दत् (dat), दन्त (danta, “tooth”).
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: ototh,tooht,toothh,tootth,totoh,ttooth
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for tooth
Misspelling Variants of "tooth"
Frequency rank: #6,305 in English
Frequently Asked Questions
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter T in our English index: