caliche
The verdict
“caliche” is an uncommon Spanish word, ranked #82,699 in Spanish word frequency and used as a noun.
- #82,699
- frequency rank, Spanish
- 7
- letters
Dominant Wiktionary sense: Costra de arena y sales minerales, que aflora en el desierto de Atacama en el norte de Chile, de la que se extrae el salitre.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | caliche |
| Language | Spanish |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | [kaˈlit͡ʃe] |
| Letters | 7 |
| Frequency rank | #82,699 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Where “caliche” sits in Spanish frequency
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The Spanish entry for caliche is 7 letters long, classified as a noun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as [kaˈlit͡ʃe]. Corpus data places it at rank #82,699 in overall Spanish word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it. Wiktionary records 4 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
No misspelling variants are generated for caliche in our index, suggesting the orthography follows predictable Spanish patterns. 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.
No explicit etymology string is stored for this entry, so spelling patterns must be inferred from the word's phoneme-to-grapheme mapping rather than from a documented borrowing chain. For readers arriving here from a spelling check, the authoritative guidance is: the correct Spanish form is caliche, spelled C-A-L-I-C-H-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1Costra de arena y sales minerales, que aflora en el desierto de Atacama en el norte de Chile, de la que se extrae el salitre.
- 2En la alfarería, pequeña piedra que queda por error incrustada en la vacija de greda.
- 3Costra de cal que se levanta de una pared encalada o enlucida.
- 4Maca, huella que deja un golpe sobre la corteza de una fruta como el melón.
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA); frequency ordering uses the FrequencyWords open word-frequency list (2018 Spanish corpus, MIT). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.
Cite this page
Free to reuse with attribution (CC BY-SA). Copy the citation:
PlainSpell, “caliche, Spanish word data” (May 6, 2026). Derived from Wiktionary (kaikki.org, CC BY-SA) and an open word-frequency list. https://plainspell.com/es/palabra/caliche
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Using “caliche”
The practical upshot for anyone who landed here from a spell-check.
- The one correct Spanish spelling is C-A-L-I-C-H-E - every other letter order is a misspelling in standard orthography.
- Say it as [kaˈlit͡ʃe] (IPA); tap the speaker on the pronunciation badge to hear it where audio exists.
- Browse more Spanish words and confusable pairs in the same reference. Spanish words
Nearby Spanish words
Other entries that begin with the letter C in our Spanish index: