womb
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
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4 characters
Language
English
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "womb", 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 "womb" 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 "womb" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
womb is aEnglishnoun. It means: In female mammals, the organ in which the young are conceived and grow until birth; the uterus. Pronounced /wuːm/. Often confused with won and wow.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | womb |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /wuːm/ |
| Letters | 4 |
| Frequency rank | #12,533 |
| Misspellings tracked | 6 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for womb is 4 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /wuːm/. Corpus data places it at rank #12,533 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 5 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 6 documented wrong-spelling variants for womb, with forms such as "owmb", "wmob", and "wobm". 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, "won", "wow", "woo", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English wombe, wambe, from Old English womb, wamb (“belly, stomach; bowels; heart; womb; hollow”), from Proto-West Germanic *wambu, from Proto-Germanic *wambō (“belly, stomach, abdomen”). Cognate with Scots wam, wame (“womb”), Dutch wam (“dewlap… 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 womb, spelled W-O-M-B, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1In female mammals, the organ in which the young are conceived and grow until birth; the uterus.
- 2The abdomen or stomach.
- 3The stomach of a person or creature.
- 4A place where something is made or formed.
- 5Any cavity containing and enveloping anything.
Etymology
From Middle English wombe, wambe, from Old English womb, wamb (“belly, stomach; bowels; heart; womb; hollow”), from Proto-West Germanic *wambu, from Proto-Germanic *wambō (“belly, stomach, abdomen”). Cognate with Scots wam, wame (“womb”), Dutch wam (“dewlap of beef; belly of a fish”), German Wamme, Wampe (“paunch, belly”), Danish vom (“belly, paunch, rumen”), Swedish våmb (“belly, stomach, rumen”), Norwegian vom (“rumen”), Icelandic vömb (“belly, abdomen, stomach”), Old Welsh gumbelauc (“womb”), Breton gwamm (“woman, wife”), Sanskrit वपा (vapā́, “the skin or membrane lining the intestines or parts of the viscera, the caul or omentum”). Superseded non-native Middle English mater, matere (“womb”) and matris, matrice (“womb”) borrowed from Latin māter (“womb”) and Old French matrice (“womb”), respectively.
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: owmb,wmob,wobm,wombb,wommb,wwomb
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for womb
Misspelling Variants of "womb"
Frequency rank: #12,533 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter W in our English index: