allegiance

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for allegiance is 10 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /əˈliː.d͡ʒəns/. Corpus data places it at rank #11,336 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "A loyalty to some cause, nation or ruler.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 13 documented wrong-spelling variants for allegiance, with forms such as "alegiance", "alelgiance", and "allegaince". 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, "alliance", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English alegiaunce, from Anglo-Norman alegaunce (“loyalty of a liege-servant to one's lord”), variant of Old French ligeance, from lige (“vassal, liegeman”). More at liege. 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 allegiance, spelled A-L-L-E-G-I-A-N-C-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.