ability

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for ability is 7 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /əˈbɪl.ə.ti/. Corpus data places it at rank #1,156 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 7 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 10 documented wrong-spelling variants for ability, with forms such as "abbility", "abiilty", and "abilitty". 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 2 confusable-pair relationships, "agility", "acidity", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: First attested in the 1300s. From Middle English abilite (“suitability, aptitude, ability”), from Old French ableté, from Latin habilitās (“aptness, ability”), from habilis (“apt, fit, skillful, able”); equivalent to able + -ity. 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 ability, spelled A-B-I-L-I-T-Y, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.