alimony

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for alimony is 7 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈæl.ɪ.mə.ni/. Corpus data places it at rank #25,653 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 2 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 10 documented wrong-spelling variants for alimony, with forms such as "ailmony", "alimmony", and "alimnoy". 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 2 confusable-pair relationships, "Alison", "almond", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: Known since the 17th century, from Latin alimōnia (“food, support, nourishment, sustenance”) (English aliment, as in alimentary), itself from alō (“to nourish”) + -mōnia (“action, state, condition”). 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 alimony, spelled A-L-I-M-O-N-Y, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.