welcome
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
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7 characters
Language
English
word origin
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "welcome", 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 "welcome" 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 "welcome" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
welcome is anEnglishadj. It means: Whose arrival is a cause of joy; received with gladness; admitted willingly to the house, entertainment, or company. Pronounced /ˈwɛl.kəm/. It ranks #1,113 in English word frequency. Often confused with welcomed.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | welcome |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Adj |
| IPA | /ˈwɛl.kəm/ |
| Letters | 7 |
| Frequency rank | #1,113 |
| Misspellings tracked | 10 |
| Confusable pairs | 1 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for welcome is 7 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈwɛl.kəm/. Corpus data places it at rank #1,113 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 3 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 welcome, with forms such as "ewlcome", "weclome", and "welccome". 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 1 confusable-pair relationship, "welcomed", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English welcome, wolcume, wulcume, wilcume, from Old English wilcuma (“a wished-for guest”; compare also wilcume (“welcome!”, interjection)), from Proto-West Germanic *willjakwemō, from Proto-Germanic *wiljakwemô (“a wished-for arrival or guest”… 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 welcome, spelled W-E-L-C-O-M-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1Whose arrival is a cause of joy; received with gladness; admitted willingly to the house, entertainment, or company.
- 2Producing gladness.
- 3Followed by to: free to have or enjoy gratuitously.
Etymology
From Middle English welcome, wolcume, wulcume, wilcume, from Old English wilcuma (“a wished-for guest”; compare also wilcume (“welcome!”, interjection)), from Proto-West Germanic *willjakwemō, from Proto-Germanic *wiljakwemô (“a wished-for arrival or guest”), possibly from *wiljakwemaną (“to be welcome”), equivalent to will (“desire”) + come (“comer, arrival”). The component wil- was replaced by wel- when the sense “guest” of the second component was no longer understood, likely under influence from the adverb well. Cognates Cognate with Scots walcome, Yola welcome, welkome, North Frisian welkimen, Saterland Frisian wilkemen, wäilkeemen, wülkemen, West Frisian wolkom, Alemannic German wol chomne, wolgcheemen, woul chemne, wéllkòmm, Cimbrian bóolkhèmm, Dutch welkom (earlier willecome), German willkommen, German Low German willkamen, Limburgish welkom, wéllekemm, Luxembourgish wëllkomm, Danish and Norwegian Bokmål velkommen, Elfdalian welkumin, Faroese vælkomin, Icelandic velkominn, Norwegian Nynorsk velkomen, Swedish välkommen, and Old French wilecome (whence Middle French willecomme (“welcome”)), from Germanic. The verb is from Middle English welcomen, wolcumen, wilcumen, from Old English wellcumian, wylcumian, wilcumian (“to welcome, receive gladly”). Similar constructions are found in Modern Greek καλώς ορίσατε (kalós orísate), South Slavic languages, such as Bulgarian добре́ дошъ́л (dobré došǎ́l), Serbo-Croatian dobrodošao, and also in Romance languages, such as Italian benvenuto, Spanish bienvenido, French bienvenu, Catalan benvingut, Portuguese bem-vindo and Romanian bun venit, meaning “[may you have fared] well [in] coming [here]”. These Romance terms do not derive from a Classical Latin root, as no similar construction in Latin is found to exist, but are instead presumed (considering the ruling elite of the Germanic kingdoms which succeeded the Western Roman Empire) to be the result of a calque from a Germanic language into Proto-Romance (Vulgar Latin; see Latin *bene venūtus, and compare perdōnō and compāniō for similar historical calques).
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: ewlcome,weclome,welccome,welcmoe,welcoem,welcomme,wellcome,welocme,wlecome,wwelcome
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for welcome
Misspelling Variants of "welcome"
Frequency rank: #1,113 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter W in our English index: