wheeze
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
Letters
6 characters
Language
English
word origin
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "wheeze", 6-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 "wheeze" 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 "wheeze" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
wheeze is aEnglishverb. It means: To breathe hard, and with an audible piping or whistling sound, as persons affected with asthma. Pronounced /ʍiːz/.
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Browse all word comparisons →| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | wheeze |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Verb |
| IPA | /ʍiːz/ |
| Letters | 6 |
| Frequency rank | #59,811 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for wheeze is 6 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ʍiːz/. Corpus data places it at rank #59,811 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 3 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
No misspelling variants are generated for wheeze in our index, suggesting the orthography follows predictable English patterns.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: From Middle English whesen, perhaps from Old Norse hvæsa (“to hiss”), ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *ḱwes- (“to pant”). 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 wheeze, spelled W-H-E-E-Z-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1To breathe hard, and with an audible piping or whistling sound, as persons affected with asthma.
- 2To convulse with laughter; to become breathless due to intense laughing.
- 3To make a sound that resembles the sound of human wheezing.
Etymology
From Middle English whesen, perhaps from Old Norse hvæsa (“to hiss”), ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *ḱwes- (“to pant”).
This word in other languages
Frequency rank: #59,811 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter W in our English index: