trick
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
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5 characters
Language
English
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "trick", 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 "trick" 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 "trick" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
trick is aEnglishnoun. It means: Something designed to fool, dupe, outsmart, mislead or swindle. Pronounced /tɹɪk/. It ranks #3,145 in English word frequency. Often confused with trip and trio.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | trick |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /tɹɪk/ |
| Letters | 5 |
| Frequency rank | #3,145 |
| Misspellings tracked | 8 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for trick is 5 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /tɹɪk/. Corpus data places it at rank #3,145 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 15 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 8 documented wrong-spelling variants for trick, with forms such as "rtick", "tirck", and "trcik". 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, "trip", "trio", "trim", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English trikke, from Old Northern French trique (related to Old French trichier (“to defraud, act dishonestly, conceal, deceive, cheat”); > modern French tricher), itself possibly from Middle High German trechen (“to launch a shot at, play a tri… 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 trick, spelled T-R-I-C-K, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1Something designed to fool, dupe, outsmart, mislead or swindle.
- 2A single element of a magician's (or any variety entertainer's) act; a magic trick.
- 3An entertaining difficult physical action.
- 4An effective, clever or quick way of doing something.
- 5Mischievous or annoying behavior; a prank.
- 6A particular habit or manner; a peculiarity; a trait.
- 7A knot, braid, or plait of hair.
- 8A sequence in which each player plays a card and a winning play is determined.
- 9A sex act, chiefly one performed for payment; an act of prostitution.
- 10A customer or client of a prostitute.
- 11A term of abuse.
- 12A daily period of work, especially in shift-based jobs.
- 13A sailor's spell of work at the helm, usually two hours long.
- 14A toy; a trifle; a plaything.
- 15A representation of arms that is drawn as an outline with labels to indicate colors.
Etymology
From Middle English trikke, from Old Northern French trique (related to Old French trichier (“to defraud, act dishonestly, conceal, deceive, cheat”); > modern French tricher), itself possibly from Middle High German trechen (“to launch a shot at, play a trick on”), or one of its derivatives (e.g. Middle High German ūftrechen (“to do something to someone, hurt someone”), vertrechen (“to conceal, get over on someone”), zuotrechen (“to obtain falsely or deceitfully, wangle, finagle”), etc.); yet the Old French verb is equally likely to be derived from Vulgar Latin *triccāre, from Late Latin tricāre, from Latin trīcor, trīcārī (“dodge, search for detours; haggle, quibble”). The term has been connected to Middle Dutch treck, trec (“draw, line, desire, game move, cord, stratagem, ruse, trick”), from Middle Dutch trekken, trēken (“to pull, place, put, move”), from Old Dutch *trekken, *trekan (“to move, drag”), from Proto-Germanic *trakjaną, *trekaną (“to drag, scrape, pull”), from Proto-Indo-European *dreg- (“to drag, scrape”). If they are related, trick would be cognate with Low German trekken, Middle High German trecken, trechen, Danish trække, and Old Frisian trekka, Romanian truc and other Romance languages. Compare track, treachery, trig, and trigger.
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: rtick,tirck,trcik,tricck,trickk,trikc,trrick,ttrick
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for trick
Misspelling Variants of "trick"
Frequency rank: #3,145 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter T in our English index: