anxious

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for anxious is 7 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈæŋ(k)ʃəs/. Corpus data places it at rank #6,112 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 4 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 9 documented wrong-spelling variants for anxious, with forms such as "anixous", "annxious", and "anxiosu". 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, "anxiously", "animus", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: Borrowed from Latin anxius, from angō (“to cause pain, choke”); akin to Ancient Greek ἄγχω (ánkhō, “to choke”). See anger; angst. 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 anxious, spelled A-N-X-I-O-U-S, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.