agony

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for agony is 5 letters long, classified as a noun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈæɡ.ə.ni/. Corpus data places it at rank #12,904 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it. Wiktionary records 5 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our generated misspelling index lists 7 likely wrong-spelling variants for agony, with forms such as "aggony", "agnoy", and "agonny". Every one of these variants traces to a single-character edit -- an added or dropped letter, a swapped consonant, or a vowel swap -- the kind of slip a spell-checker is built to catch. It also participates in 19 confusable-pair relationships, "any", "Avon", "anon", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: 14th century, via Old French and Latin from Ancient Greek ἀγωνία (agōnía, “emulation, competition, struggle”), from ἀγών (agṓn, “contest”). Specifically of the struggle that precedes death (mortal agony) from the 1540s. The sense of "extreme pain" from c. 1… The correct English form is agony, spelled A-G-O-N-Y.