wool
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 "wool", 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 "wool" 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 "wool" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
wool is aEnglishnoun. It means: The hair of the sheep, llama and some other ruminants. Pronounced /wʊl/. It ranks #8,228 in English word frequency. Often confused with wow and WTO.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | wool |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /wʊl/ |
| Letters | 4 |
| Frequency rank | #8,228 |
| Misspellings tracked | 5 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for wool is 4 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /wʊl/. Corpus data places it at rank #8,228 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 8 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 wool, with forms such as "owol", "wol", and "wolo". 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, "wow", "WTO", "wot", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English wolle, from Old English wull, from Proto-West Germanic *wullu, from Proto-Germanic *wullō, from Proto-Indo-European *h₂wĺ̥h₁neh₂. Cognates Cognate with Saterland Frisian Wulle, German Low German Wull, Dutch wol, German Wolle, Norwegian u… 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 wool, spelled W-O-O-L, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1The hair of the sheep, llama and some other ruminants.
- 2A cloth or yarn made from such hair.
- 3Anything with a fibrous texture like that of sheep's wool.
- 4A fine fiber obtained from the leaves of certain trees, such as firs and pines.
- 5Short, thick hair, especially when crisped or curled.
- 6Yarn, including that made from synthetic fibers.
- 7A woolly back; a resident of a satellite town outside Liverpool, such as St Helens or Warrington. See also Yonner.
- 8A marijuana cigarette or cigar laced with crack cocaine.
Etymology
From Middle English wolle, from Old English wull, from Proto-West Germanic *wullu, from Proto-Germanic *wullō, from Proto-Indo-European *h₂wĺ̥h₁neh₂. Cognates Cognate with Saterland Frisian Wulle, German Low German Wull, Dutch wol, German Wolle, Norwegian ull; also Welsh gwlân, Latin lāna, Lithuanian vi̇̀lna, Russian во́лос (vólos), Slovak vlna, Bulgarian влас (vlas), Albanian lesh (“wool, hair, fleece”). Doublet of lana. The vowel development u → o → oo is purely graphical. Modern English generally avoids the string ⟨wu⟩ in favour of ⟨wo⟩, and the resulting woll was then altered to wool (as supposedly better representing the pronunciation).
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: owol,wol,wolo,wooll,wwool
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for wool
Misspelling Variants of "wool"
Frequency rank: #8,228 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter W in our English index: