accrue

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for accrue is 6 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /əˈkɹuː/. Corpus data places it at rank #32,264 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 5 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 6 documented wrong-spelling variants for accrue, with forms such as "accreu", "accrrue", and "accure". 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 4 confusable-pair relationships, "acre", "accuse", "accrued", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: First attested in mid 15th century. From Middle English acrewen, borrowed from Old French acreüe, past participle of accreistre (“to increase”), from Latin accrēsco (“increase”), from ad (“in addition”) + crēscō (“to grow”). 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 accrue, spelled A-C-C-R-U-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.