active ingredient
"active-ingredient" is a 16-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“active ingredient” is uncommon English (outside the top frequency list), classed as a noun. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency English
- 17
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - The specific compound in a natural or man-made mixture that is responsible for the mixture's activity.
Corpus desk
Index EN-active-ingredient · active ingredient · English
active ingredient · unranked · 0 variants · 0 confusables
- FREQ-UNRANKED Unranked
- LEN-MEGA 17 letters
- VOW-7 7 vowels
- CONFUS-0 No pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-THIN "A" thin
- PHOTO-UNK Peer pending
Read with this headword: Spelling guide for this pattern
Desk codes from Wiktionary headword shape, FrequencyWords rank tier, confusable-pair count, generated misspelling depth, letter-cohort book size, and photo-finish peer. Not a difficulty grade.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | active ingredient |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| Letters | 17 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Long-tail rank of “active ingredient” in English
Rare enough to double-check
active ingredient is uncommon English outside the top frequency list, classed as anoun. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. 2 senses are on record.
active ingredient has no tracked misspelling variants, since its letter pattern doesn't lend itself to common typo substitutions. It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, since its spelling is unusual enough that it doesn't cluster with a lookalike.
This entry carries no recorded etymology, so spelling patterns must be inferred from the word's phoneme-to-grapheme mapping rather than from a documented borrowing chain. The correct English form is active ingredient, spelled A-C-T-I-V-E- -I-N-G-R-E-D-I-E-N-T.
Definition
- 1The specific compound in a natural or man-made mixture that is responsible for the mixture's activity.
- 2The essence of something, or a sine qua non that it requires.
Recorded use
Wiktionary exampleThese source excerpts show how active ingredient appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
I think many humans never learn how to do this, either. They assume that our existence is nothing more than an endless lurching in the direction of the things you want, and never actually getting them. Life is hard and then you die; stick a needle in your eye! There are people with the opposite problem, of course: people who refuse to take on any amount o…
This word in other languages
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.