addictive

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for addictive is 9 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /əˈdɪktɪv/. Corpus data places it at rank #12,722 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 3 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 11 documented wrong-spelling variants for addictive, with forms such as "addcitive", "addicctive", and "addicitve". 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, "additive", "adjective", "addiction", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: First attested 1914. Addiction in modern sense is first attested 1906, in reference to opium. There is an isolated instance from 1779, with reference to tobacco. 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 addictive, spelled A-D-D-I-C-T-I-V-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.