adolescent

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for adolescent is 10 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˌæd.əˈlɛs.ənt/. Corpus data places it at rank #13,277 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "Of, relating to, or at the age of adolescence; at the stage between being a child and an adult.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 15 documented wrong-spelling variants for adolescent, with forms such as "addolescent", "adloescent", and "adoelscent". 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, "adolescence", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: First attested ?1440, from Middle English adolescent, from Middle French adolescent or directly from Latin adolescentem, accusative form of adolescens, present participle of adolēscere (“to become adult, grow up”), from ad- (“to”) + alēscere (“to grow or be… 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 adolescent, spelled A-D-O-L-E-S-C-E-N-T, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.