variety
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
Letters
7 characters
Language
English
word origin
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "variety", 7-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 "variety" 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 "variety" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
variety is aEnglishnoun. It means: A deviation or difference. Pronounced /vəˈɹaɪ.ɪ.ti/. It ranks #1,846 in English word frequency. Often confused with verity and varsity.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | variety |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /vəˈɹaɪ.ɪ.ti/ |
| Letters | 7 |
| Frequency rank | #1,846 |
| Misspellings tracked | 10 |
| Confusable pairs | 5 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for variety is 7 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /vəˈɹaɪ.ɪ.ti/. Corpus data places it at rank #1,846 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 13 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 10 documented wrong-spelling variants for variety, with forms such as "avriety", "vairety", and "vareity". 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, "verity", "varsity", "varied", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle French varieté (“variety”) (modern French variété (“variety; genre, type”)) or directly from its etymon Latin varietās (“difference; diversity, variety”) + English -ty (suffix forming abstract nouns from adjectives); by surface analysis, various… 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 variety, spelled V-A-R-I-E-T-Y, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1A deviation or difference.
- 2A specific variation of something.
- 3A specific variation of something.
- 4A specific variation of something.
- 5A specific variation of something.
- 6A specific variation of something.
- 7A collection or number of different things.
- 8A collection or number of different things.
- 9A collection or number of different things.
- 10A collection or number of different things.
- 11Ellipsis of variety performance or variety show (“a type of entertainment featuring a succession of short, unrelated performances by various artistes such as (depending on the medium) acrobats, comedians, dancers, magicians, singers, etc.”).
- 12The quality of being varied; diversity.
- 13The kind of entertainment given in variety performances or shows; also, the production of, or performance in, variety performances or shows.
Etymology
From Middle French varieté (“variety”) (modern French variété (“variety; genre, type”)) or directly from its etymon Latin varietās (“difference; diversity, variety”) + English -ty (suffix forming abstract nouns from adjectives); by surface analysis, various + -ety. Varietās is derived from varius (“different, diverse, various; variegated”) (possibly ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *h₁weh₂- (“to abandon; to give out; to leave”)) + -tās (suffix forming feminine abstract nouns indicating a state of being). The English word displaced the native Old English mislīcnes. Sense 1.3.2 (“total number of distinct states of a system; logarithm to the base 2 of the total number of distinct states of a system”) was coined by the English psychiatrist William Ross Ashby (1903–1972) in his work An Introduction to Cybernetics (1956). Cognates * Galician variedade (“variety”) * Italian varietà (“difference; variety”) * Portuguese variedade (“variety”) * Spanish variedad (“breed; variety”)
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: avriety,vairety,vareity,varietty,varietyy,varieyt,varitey,varriety,vraiety,vvariety
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for variety
Misspelling Variants of "variety"
Frequency rank: #1,846 in English
Frequently Asked Questions
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter V in our English index: