wife
/wæf/noun, verb
wife is spelled W-I-F-E. The wrong spelling people search most is wief: about 20 Bing searches a month in the United States (September 2025 to August 2026), about 1 in 909 of all searches for the word. Wife is a noun meaning “A married woman, especially in relation to her spouse”. The plural of wife is wives.
How many letters and syllables are in wife?
| Letters | 4: W-I-F-E |
|---|---|
| Syllables | 1 (from its American pronunciation) |
| In writing | 170 times per million words; the 591st most frequent word form |
| Wrong spellings searched | 1; the most searched, wief, about 20 Bing searches a month (all of them) |
Sources: letters and syllables from the English Wiktionary's hyphenation or pronunciation and the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary; written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media); Bing searches in the United States: the average month from September 2025 to August 2026 (Microsoft Advertising keyword data through DataForSEO, read September 30, 2026).
How do you spell wife?
Wife is spelled W-I-F-E. One wrong spelling is searched or written often enough to measure; together they are about 1 in 893 of the searches for wife in either form.
Bing searches in the United States: the average month from September 2025 to August 2026 (Microsoft Advertising keyword data through DataForSEO, read September 30, 2026). Wrong spellings are taken from Wiktionary entries tagged "misspelling" and its obsolete or nonstandard forms, Wikipedia's Lists of common misspellings and the codespell dictionary, then measured. The proofreader's marks show the change that corrects each one.
How common is wife?
Wife appears 170 times per million words in written English, the 591st most frequent word form in the list.
Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).
How do you pronounce wife?
- /wæf/
- /waɪf/
Wife has one syllable (counted from its American pronunciation in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary).
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: En-us-wife.ogg, En-uk-wife.ogg, LL-Q1860_(eng)-Greenman-wife.wav, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).
Forms of wife
- wives plural
- wifes present, singular, he/she/it
- wifing participle, present
- wifed participle, past
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
What does wife mean?
The meanings the English Wiktionary records, quoted as written there (source below).
noun
- 1
A married woman, especially in relation to her spouse.
The Fisherman and His Wife
- 2
The female of a pair of mated animals.
A new wife for the gander is introduced into the pen.
- 3
ScotlandSynonym of woman.
verb
- 1
colloquialTo marry (a woman).
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
Wife in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese
In the sense female partner in a marriage:
| Language | Words |
|---|---|
| French | femme, épouse |
| German | Ehefrau, Frau, Eheweib, Weib, Gemahlin, Gattin |
| Portuguese | esposa, mulher |
| Spanish | esposa, mujer, jerma |
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Translations are Wiktionary's, by sense; a linked word has its own PlainSpell page.
Where does wife come from?
Inherited from Middle English wyf, wif, from Old English wīf (“woman, wife”), from Proto-West Germanic *wīb, from Proto-Germanic *wībą (“woman; wife”).
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).