accomplice

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for accomplice is 10 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /əˈkɒm.plɪs/. Corpus data places it at rank #21,715 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 2 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 13 documented wrong-spelling variants for accomplice, with forms such as "accmoplice", "accomlpice", and "accommplice". 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 1 confusable-pair relationship, "accomplish", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: First attested in 1550. From a complice, from Middle English complice, from Old French complice (“confederate”), from Latin complicāre (“fold together”). The article a became part of the word, through the influence of the word accomplish. 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 accomplice, spelled A-C-C-O-M-P-L-I-C-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.