allege

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for allege is 6 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /əˈlɛd͡ʒ/. Corpus data places it at rank #22,884 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 4 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 6 documented wrong-spelling variants for allege, with forms such as "alege", "alelge", and "alleeg". 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 15 confusable-pair relationships, "Allen", "alley", "Allie", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English aleggen, perhaps from Old French alleguer, or from Anglo-Norman aleger, the form perhaps from Old French esligier (“to acquit”), from Medieval Latin *exlītigāre (“to clear at law”), from Latin ex (“out”) + lītigō (“sue at law”), but the … 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 allege, spelled A-L-L-E-G-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.