adolescence

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for adolescence is 11 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˌædəˈlɛsəns/. Corpus data places it at rank #18,003 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "The transitional period of physical and psychological development between childhood and maturity, beginning at the onset of puberty and with an endpoint defined either legally (at the age of majori...".

Our generated misspelling index lists 17 likely wrong-spelling variants for adolescence, with forms such as "addolescence", "adloescence", and "adoelscence". Each variant is a distinct typo pattern an edit-distance generator flags, typically a doubled-consonant error, a silent-letter drop, or a vowel substitution.It also participates in 1 confusable-pair relationship, "adolescent", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English adolescence, from Old French adolescence, from Latin adolēscentia, from adolēscēns (“young”); see adolescent. 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 adolescence, spelled A-D-O-L-E-S-C-E-N-C-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.