Elfenbein

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The German entry for Elfenbein is 9 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as [ˈɛlfn̩ˌbaɪ̯n]. Corpus data places it at rank #24,317 in overall German word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "Material bestimmter Tierzähne und -knochen, hauptsächlich Stoßzähne von Elefanten, aber auch Zähne von Mammuts, Nilpferden, Wildschweinen, Walrossen, Pottwalen und Narwalen".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 13 documented wrong-spelling variants for Elfenbein, with forms such as "eflenbein", "elefnbein", and "elfebnein". 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 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 German form is Elfenbein, spelled E-L-F-E-N-B-E-I-N, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.