applause

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for applause is 8 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /əˈplɔːz/. Corpus data places it at rank #9,136 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "The act of applauding; approbation and praise publicly expressed by the clapping of hands, stamping or tapping of the feet, acclamation, huzzas, or other means; marked commendation.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 9 documented wrong-spelling variants for applause, with forms such as "aplause", "aplpause", and "appaluse". 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, "applaud", "appease", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Latin applausus, from applaudō (“I strike against, I applaud”) (whence applaud). 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 applause, spelled A-P-P-L-A-U-S-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.