weather
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
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7 characters
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English
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "weather", 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 "weather" 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 "weather" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
weather is aEnglishnoun. It means: The short-term state of the atmosphere at a specific time and place, including the temperature, relative humidity, cloud cover, precipitation, wind, etc. Pronounced /ˈwɛð.ə/. It ranks #1,443 in English word frequency. Often confused with weaver and wither.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | weather |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /ˈwɛð.ə/ |
| Letters | 7 |
| Frequency rank | #1,443 |
| Misspellings tracked | 10 |
| Confusable pairs | 11 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for weather is 7 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈwɛð.ə/. Corpus data places it at rank #1,443 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 6 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 weather, with forms such as "ewather", "waether", and "weahter". 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 11 confusable-pair relationships, "weaver", "wither", "wetter", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English weder, wedir, from Old English weder, from Proto-West Germanic *wedr, from Proto-Germanic *wedrą, from Proto-Indo-European *wedʰrom (=*we-dʰrom), from *h₂weh₁- (“to blow”). Cognates Cognate with Scots wather (“weather”), Saterland Frisia… 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 weather, spelled W-E-A-T-H-E-R, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1The short-term state of the atmosphere at a specific time and place, including the temperature, relative humidity, cloud cover, precipitation, wind, etc.
- 2Unpleasant or destructive atmospheric conditions, and their effects.
- 3The direction from which the wind is blowing; used attributively to indicate the windward side.
- 4A situation.
- 5A storm; a tempest.
- 6A light shower of rain.
Etymology
From Middle English weder, wedir, from Old English weder, from Proto-West Germanic *wedr, from Proto-Germanic *wedrą, from Proto-Indo-European *wedʰrom (=*we-dʰrom), from *h₂weh₁- (“to blow”). Cognates Cognate with Scots wather (“weather”), Saterland Frisian Weeder (“weather”), Cimbrian bèttar (“weather”), Dutch weder, weer (“weather”), German Wetter (“weather”), Low German Weder (“weather”), Luxembourgish Wieder (“weather”), Yiddish וועטער (veter, “weather”), Danish vejr (“weather”), Faroese, Icelandic veður (“weather”), Norwegian Bokmål vær (“weather”), Norwegian Nynorsk veder, vêr (“weather”), Swedish väder (“weather”); also more distantly related to Russian вёдро (vjódro, “fair weather”) and perhaps Albanian vrëndë (“light rain”). Other cognates include Sanskrit निर्वाण (nirvāṇa, “blown or put out, extinguished”).
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: ewather,waether,weahter,weatehr,weatherr,weathher,weathre,weatther,wetaher,wweather
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for weather
Misspelling Variants of "weather"
Frequency rank: #1,443 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter W in our English index: