elf

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The German entry for elf is 3 letters long, classified as anum, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as [ɛlf]. Corpus data places it at rank #2,588 in overall German word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 3 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

No frequent misspelling variants are recorded for elf in our index, suggesting the orthography either follows predictable German patterns or the word is uncommon enough that typo corpora lack signal.It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "es", "er", "EU", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

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 German form is elf, spelled E-L-F, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.