vale-of-tears
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
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13 characters
Language
English
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "vale-of-tears", 13-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 "vale-of-tears" 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 "vale-of-tears" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
vale of tears is aEnglishnoun. It means: The world, a place where difficulties and the sorrows of life are felt, especially (Christianity) as a place to be left behind when one dies and goes to heaven. Pronounced /ˈveɪl əv ˈtɪəz/.
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Browse all word comparisons →| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | vale of tears |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /ˈveɪl əv ˈtɪəz/ |
| Letters | 13 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for vale of tears is 13 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈveɪl əv ˈtɪəz/. It sits outside the most-frequent rank tiers, which is often why uncommon words generate more spelling variants per reader.Wiktionary records 2 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
No frequent misspelling variants are recorded for vale of tears in our index, suggesting the orthography either follows predictable English patterns or the word is uncommon enough that typo corpora lack signal.It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, which tends to mean the word is visually distinctive enough to stand on its own.
Etymologically, the entry records: Calque of Latin lacrimārum vallis from the “Salve Regina” (a hymn to the Virgin Mary), based on Hebrew עמק הבכא (ʿēmeq habbāḵāʾ) from Psalm 84:6 of the Bible. The Hebrew term may mean “valley of the baka tree”, a tree of uncertain species (compare 2 Samuel … 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 vale of tears, spelled V-A-L-E- -O-F- -T-E-A-R-S, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1The world, a place where difficulties and the sorrows of life are felt, especially (Christianity) as a place to be left behind when one dies and goes to heaven.
- 2A particular place of sorrow or suffering.
Etymology
Calque of Latin lacrimārum vallis from the “Salve Regina” (a hymn to the Virgin Mary), based on Hebrew עמק הבכא (ʿēmeq habbāḵāʾ) from Psalm 84:6 of the Bible. The Hebrew term may mean “valley of the baka tree”, a tree of uncertain species (compare 2 Samuel 5:23–24 where baka is used to refer to a tree, and is often translated into English as “balsam tree”, “mulberry tree”, or “poplar tree”), but ancient Greek translations assumed the word intended was בָּכָה (bakhá, “to cry, weep”) and so rendered the term as “valley of weeping”, which was then used in Latin and English translations. See, for example, the Douay–Rheims Bible (1610) where the verse is numbered as Psalm 83:6.
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