altar

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for altar is 5 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈɒl.tə/. Corpus data places it at rank #9,562 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 7 documented wrong-spelling variants for altar, with forms such as "alatr", "alltar", and "altarr". 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 20 confusable-pair relationships, "ATA", "ATR", "alto", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: Inherited from Middle English auter, inherited from Old English altar and borrowed from Old French auter, both derived from Latin altāre, probably related to adolere (“burn”); thus "burning place", influenced by altus (“high”). Displaced native Middle Engli… 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 altar, spelled A-L-T-A-R, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.