us
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
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2 characters
Language
English
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "us", 2-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 "us" 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 "us" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
us is aEnglishpron. It means: Me and at least one other person, excluding the person(s) being addressed. (exclusive us.) Pronounced /əs/. It ranks #95 in English word frequency. Often confused with UT and UV.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | us |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Pron |
| IPA | /əs/ |
| Letters | 2 |
| Frequency rank | #95 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for us is 2 letters long, classified as apron, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /əs/. Corpus data places it at rank #95 in overall English word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language.Wiktionary records 9 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
No frequent misspelling variants are recorded for us in our index, suggesting the orthography either follows predictable English patterns or the word is uncommon enough that typo corpora lack signal.It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "UT", "UV", "UW", 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 *n̥smé Proto-Germanic *uns Old English ūs Middle English us English us From Middle English us, from Old English ūs (“us”, dative personal pronoun), from Proto-West Germanic *uns, from Proto-Germanic *uns (“us”), from Proto… 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 us, spelled U-S, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1Me and at least one other person, excluding the person(s) being addressed. (exclusive us.)
- 2Me and at least one other person, including the person(s) being addressed. (inclusive us.)
- 3We, used in the same circumstances where "me" would be used instead of "I", e.g. for the pronoun in isolation or as the complement of the copula
- 4Any entity that the speaker is a part of or identifies with, such as place of employment or education, nation, region, language, etc.
- 5People in general.
- 6The person(s) being addressed.
- 7Used to imply connection between the speaker's experiences or activities and a group of listeners.
- 8Me.
- 9Me (in all contexts).
Etymology
Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *n̥smé Proto-Germanic *uns Old English ūs Middle English us English us From Middle English us, from Old English ūs (“us”, dative personal pronoun), from Proto-West Germanic *uns, from Proto-Germanic *uns (“us”), from Proto-Indo-European *n̥swé, alteration of *n̥smé (“us”). The compensatory lengthening was lost in Middle English due to the word being unstressed when used. Cognate with Saterland Frisian uus (“us”), West Frisian us, ús (“us”), Low German uns, us (“us”), Dutch ons (“us”), German uns (“us”), Danish os (“us”), Latin nōs (“we, us”).
This word in other languages
Frequency rank: #95 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter U in our English index: