anathema

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for anathema is 8 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /əˈnæθəmə/. Corpus data places it at rank #37,317 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 11 documented wrong-spelling variants for anathema, with forms such as "aanthema", "anahtema", and "anatehma". 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, "anthem", "anthems", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: Borrowed from Late Latin anathema (“curse, person cursed, offering”), itself a borrowing from Ancient Greek ἀνάθεμα (anáthema, “something dedicated, especially dedicated to eternal damnation”), from ἀνατίθημι (anatíthēmi, “I set upon, offer as a votive gift… 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 anathema, spelled A-N-A-T-H-E-M-A, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.