wide
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
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4 characters
Language
English
word origin
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "wide", 4-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 "wide" 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 "wide" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
wide is anEnglishadj. It means: Having a large physical extent from side to side. Pronounced /waɪd/. It ranks #1,177 in English word frequency. Often confused with win and WWE.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | wide |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Adj |
| IPA | /waɪd/ |
| Letters | 4 |
| Frequency rank | #1,177 |
| Misspellings tracked | 5 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for wide is 4 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /waɪd/. Corpus data places it at rank #1,177 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 11 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 5 documented wrong-spelling variants for wide, with forms such as "iwde", "wdie", and "widde". 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 20 confusable-pair relationships, "win", "WWE", "wit", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: PIE word *dwóh₁ From Middle English wid, wyd, from Old English wīd (“wide, vast, broad, long; distant, far”), from Proto-Germanic *wīdaz, from Proto-Indo-European *h₁weydʰh₁- (“to divide, separate”), a dissimilated univerbation from *dwi- (“apart, asunder,… 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 wide, spelled W-I-D-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1Having a large physical extent from side to side.
- 2Large in scope.
- 3Overweight, obese.
- 4Operating at the side of the playing area.
- 5On one side or the other of the mark; too far sideways from the mark, the wicket, the batsman, etc.
- 6Made, as a vowel, with a less tense, and more open and relaxed, condition of the organs in the mouth.
- 7Vast, great in extent, extensive.
- 8Located some distance away; distant, far.
- 9Far from truth, propriety, necessity, etc.
- 10Of or supporting a greater range of text characters than can fit into the traditional 8-bit representation.
- 11Sharp-witted.
Etymology
PIE word *dwóh₁ From Middle English wid, wyd, from Old English wīd (“wide, vast, broad, long; distant, far”), from Proto-Germanic *wīdaz, from Proto-Indo-European *h₁weydʰh₁- (“to divide, separate”), a dissimilated univerbation from *dwi- (“apart, asunder, in two”) + *dʰeh₁- (“to do, put, place”). Cognates Cognate with North Frisian widj (“wide”), Saterland Frisian wied (“wide”), West Frisian wiid (“broad; wide”), Central Franconian weck, weit, wick, wiet (“distant, far, wide”), Dutch wijd (“wide; large; broad”), German weit (“far; wide; broad”), Luxembourgish weit (“wide”), wäit (“far”), Yiddish ווײַט (vayt, “distant, far”), Danish, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk, and Swedish vid (“wide”), Faroese and Icelandic víður (“wide”); also Breton gwez (“trees”), Cornish gwedh, gwëdh, gwydh, gwÿdh (“trees”), Irish and Scottish Gaelic fiodh (“timber, wood”), Manx fuygh (“timber, wood”), Welsh gwŷdd (“trees”), Latin dīvidō (“to divide, separate”), Latgalian vyds (“middle”), Latvian vidus (“center, middle”), Lithuanian vidùs (“interior, inside; inward”), Tocharian A and Tocharian B wätk- (“to distinguish, separate”). Related to widow.
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: iwde,wdie,widde,wied,wwide
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for wide
Misspelling Variants of "wide"
Frequency rank: #1,177 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter W in our English index: