vitamin
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
Letters
7 characters
Language
English
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "vitamin", 7-letters, with pronunciation in International Phonetic Alphabet notation, etymology traced through Germanic and Romance roots where applicable, common misspelling variants catalogued from Wiktionary, and usage frequency ranked against an open word-frequency list covering the top 100,000 English words. PlainSpell covers English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and German spelling with confusable-pair detection that highlights visually and phonetically similar words. This entry for "vitamin" 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 "vitamin" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
vitamin is aEnglishnoun. It means: Any of a specific group of organic compounds essential in small quantities for healthy human growth, metabolism, development, and body function; found in minute amounts in plant and animal foods or... Pronounced /ˈvɪt.ə.mɪn/. It ranks #7,081 in English word frequency.
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Browse all word comparisons →| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | vitamin |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /ˈvɪt.ə.mɪn/ |
| Letters | 7 |
| Frequency rank | #7,081 |
| Misspellings tracked | 10 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for vitamin is 7 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈvɪt.ə.mɪn/. Corpus data places it at rank #7,081 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 2 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our generated misspelling index lists 10 likely wrong-spelling variants for vitamin, with forms such as "ivtamin", "viatmin", and "vitaimn". Each variant is a distinct typo pattern an edit-distance generator flags, typically a doubled-consonant error, a silent-letter drop, or a vowel substitution.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: 1920, originally vitamine (1912), from Latin vīta (“life”) (see vital) + amine (see amino acids). Vitamine coined by Polish biochemist Casimir Funk after the initial discovery of aberic acid (thiamine), when it was thought that all such nutrients would be a… 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 vitamin, spelled V-I-T-A-M-I-N, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1Any of a specific group of organic compounds essential in small quantities for healthy human growth, metabolism, development, and body function; found in minute amounts in plant and animal foods or sometimes produced synthetically; deficiencies of specific vitamins produce specific disorders.
- 2preceding a word or its initial letter, to imply that the referent benefits health or wellness
Etymology
1920, originally vitamine (1912), from Latin vīta (“life”) (see vital) + amine (see amino acids). Vitamine coined by Polish biochemist Casimir Funk after the initial discovery of aberic acid (thiamine), when it was thought that all such nutrients would be amines. The term had become ubiquitous by the time it was discovered that vitamin C, among others, had no amine component. In 1920, British biochemist Jack Drummond proposed that the final -e be dropped to deemphasize the amine reference. The ending -in was acceptable because it was used for natural substances of undefined composition. Drummond also introduced the lettering system of nomenclature (Vitamin A, B, C, etc.) at this same time.
Synonyms
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: ivtamin,viatmin,vitaimn,vitaminn,vitammin,vitamni,vitmain,vittamin,vtiamin,vvitamin
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for vitamin
Misspelling Variants of "vitamin"
Frequency rank: #7,081 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter V in our English index: