wilderness
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
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10 characters
Language
English
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "wilderness", 10-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 "wilderness" 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 "wilderness" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
wilderness is aEnglishnoun. It means: Uncultivated and unsettled land in its natural state inhabited by wild animals and with vegetation growing wild; (countable) a tract of such land; a waste or wild. Pronounced /ˈwɪldənəs/. It ranks #7,763 in English word frequency.
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Browse all word comparisons →| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | wilderness |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /ˈwɪldənəs/ |
| Letters | 10 |
| Frequency rank | #7,763 |
| Misspellings tracked | 14 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for wilderness is 10 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈwɪldənəs/. Corpus data places it at rank #7,763 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 7 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 14 documented wrong-spelling variants for wilderness, with forms such as "iwlderness", "widlerness", and "wildderness". 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 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 wildernes, wildernesse (“desolate or uninhabited place, desolation”) [and other forms], and then either: * from Middle English wilderne (“deserted or uninhabited place, wilderness; land not yet settled”) [and other forms] (from Old Engli… 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 wilderness, spelled W-I-L-D-E-R-N-E-S-S, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1Uncultivated and unsettled land in its natural state inhabited by wild animals and with vegetation growing wild; (countable) a tract of such land; a waste or wild.
- 2A place other than land (for example, the air or sea) that is uncared for, and therefore devoted to disorder or wildness.
- 3An ornamental part of a garden or park cultivated with trees and often a maze to evoke a natural wilderness.
- 4Unrefinedness; wildness.
- 5Chiefly followed by of: a bewildering flock or throng; a large, often jumbled, collection of things.
- 6A place or situation that is bewildering and in which one may get lost.
- 7Preceded by in the: a situation of disfavour or lack of recognition; (specifically, politics) of a politician, political party, etc.: a situation of being out of office.
Etymology
From Middle English wildernes, wildernesse (“desolate or uninhabited place, desolation”) [and other forms], and then either: * from Middle English wilderne (“deserted or uninhabited place, wilderness; land not yet settled”) [and other forms] (from Old English wilddeōren (“savage, wild”); see below) + -nes, -nesse (suffix forming abstract nouns denoting qualities or states); or * from Old English *wildēornes, *wilddēornes, either from wilddēor (“wild animal”) [and other forms] or wilddēoren (“savage, wild”) (from wilddēor + -en (suffix forming adjectives with the sense ‘consisting of; material made of’)) + -nes (suffix forming abstract nouns denoting qualities or states). Wilddēor is derived from wilde (“savage, wild”) (ultimately either from Proto-Indo-European *wel-, *welw- (“hair, wool; ear of corn, grass; forest”), or *gʷʰel- (“wild”)) + dēor (“beast, wild animal”) (ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *dʰwes- (“to breathe; breath; soul, spirit; creature”)). The English word is cognate with Danish vildnis (“wilderness”), German Wildernis, Wildnis (“wilderness”), Middle Dutch wildernisse (“wilderness”) (modern Dutch wildernis (“wilderness”)), Middle Low German wildernisse (“wilderness”) (German Low German Wildernis (“wilderness”)), Saterland Frisian Wüüldernis (“wilderness”), West Frisian wyldernis (“wilderness”). Sense 3.3 (“situation of disfavour or lack of recognition”) is a reference to Numbers 14:32–33 in the Bible (King James Version; spelling modernized): “But as for you, your carcasses, they shall fall in this wilderness. And your children shall wander in the wilderness forty years, and bear your whoredoms, until your carcasses be wasted in the wilderness.”
Synonyms
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: iwlderness,widlerness,wildderness,wildenress,wilderenss,wildernes,wildernness,wildernses,wilderrness,wildreness,wiledrness,willderness,wliderness,wwilderness
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for wilderness
Misspelling Variants of "wilderness"
Frequency rank: #7,763 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter W in our English index: