afraid

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for afraid is 6 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /əˈfɹeɪd/. Corpus data places it at rank #2,027 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 3 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 8 documented wrong-spelling variants for afraid, with forms such as "afarid", "affraid", and "afradi". 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 3 confusable-pair relationships, "arid", "Afridi", "affair", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English affrayed, affraied, past participle of afraien (“to affray”), from Anglo-Norman afrayer (“to terrify, disquiet, disturb”), from Old French effreer, esfreer (“to disturb, remove the peace from”), from es- (“out”) + freer (“to secure, secu… 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 afraid, spelled A-F-R-A-I-D, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.