ablution

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for ablution is 8 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /əˈbluː.ʃn̩/. Corpus data places it at rank #82,963 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 8 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

No misspelling variants are generated for ablution in our index, suggesting the orthography follows predictable English 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.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English ablucioun (“cleansing of impurities”), from Old French ablution, and its source, Late Latin ablūtiō (“a washing away”), from abluō (“wash away”), from ab- (“away”) + lavō (“wash”). 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 ablution, spelled A-B-L-U-T-I-O-N, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.