year
/jɪə/noun
year is spelled Y-E-A-R. The wrong spelling people search most is eyar: about 20 Bing searches a month in the United States (September 2025 to August 2026), about 1 in 222 of all searches for the word. Year is a noun meaning “A period of time akin to the time taken for the Earth to undergo a full cycle of seasons”. The plural of year is years.
How many letters and syllables are in year?
| Letters | 4: Y-E-A-R |
|---|---|
| Syllables | 1 |
| In writing | 912 times per million words; the 117th most frequent word form |
| Wrong spellings searched | 4; the most searched, eyar, about 20 Bing searches a month (all of them) |
| Pairs people search | |
| Rhymes with | |
| Same letters |
Sources: letters and syllables from the English Wiktionary's hyphenation or pronunciation; 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); rhymes and same-letter words are computed by PlainSpell from its own word list.
How do you spell year?
Year is spelled Y-E-A-R. 4 wrong spellings are searched or written often enough to measure; together they are about 1 in 64 of the searches for year 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 year?
Year appears 912 times per million words in written English, the 117th 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 year?
- UK /jɪə/
- British /jɪː/
- British /jɪjə/
Year has one syllable.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: En-uk-a_year.ogg, LL-Q1860_(eng)-Back_ache-year.wav, En-us-year.ogg, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).
Words people confuse with year
Word pairs people search, with the monthly searches for “a vs b” (G: Google, B: Bing, United States).
Sources: Google and Bing searches (September 2025 to August 2026, through DataForSEO); English Wiktionary (homophones, alternative spellings).
What rhymes with year?
The 12 most written words on PlainSpell end in the same sounds as year from its last stressed vowel (/ɪə/, British pronunciation):
Spelled with the same letters in another order: ayre, yare, aery.
Computed by PlainSpell from the pronunciations in the English Wiktionary (dump of September 2, 2026): a rhyme shares every sound from the last stressed vowel to the end; ordered by written frequency (wordfreq 3.1).
Forms of year
- years plural
- yeah
- yur
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
What does year mean?
The meanings the English Wiktionary records, quoted as written there (source below).
noun
- 1
A period of time akin to the time taken for the Earth to undergo a full cycle of seasons.
we moved to this town a year ago; I quit smoking exactly one year ago
- 2
The time taken for the Earth to return to the same position along the ecliptic, completing a full cycle of seasons; a tropical year or solar year.
- 3
The time taken for the Earth to orbit the Sun with respect to the fixed stars; a sidereal year.
- 4
The length of twelve lunations; the time taken for any moon phase to happen twelve times; a lunar year.
- 5
The length of a year as marked by a calendar, 365 or 366 days in the Gregorian calendar; a calendar year.
- 6
The mean length of a calendar year in the Julian calendar, that is, 365.25 solar days; a Julian year.
- 7
An orbital period: the period of one revolution in any particular orbit: The time it takes for any astronomical object (such as a planet, dwarf planet, small Solar System body, or comet) in direct orbit around a star (such as the Sun) to make one revolution around the star.
Mars goes around the sun once in a Martian year, or 1.88 Earth years.
- 8
A period between set dates that mark a year, such as from January 1 to December 31 by the Gregorian calendar, from Tishri 1 to Elul 29 by the Jewish calendar, and from Muharram 1 to Dhu al-Hijjah 29 or 30 by the Islamic calendar.
A normal year has 365 full days, but there are 366 days in a leap year.
- 9
Pronunciation spelling of here.
- 10
Pronunciation spelling of hear.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
How do you abbreviate year?
Wiktionary records 4 abbreviations of year: Y, y, yr, yy.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
Year in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese
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 year come from?
From Middle English yeer, yere, from Old English ġēar (“year”), from Proto-West Germanic *jār, from Proto-Germanic *jērą (“year”), from Proto-Indo-European *yóh₁r̥ (“year, spring”). Doublet of hora and hour.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).