arraignment

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for arraignment is 11 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /əˈɹeɪnmənt/. Corpus data places it at rank #36,873 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "The formal charging of a defendant with an offense; in many jurisdictions it includes their response in the form of a plea, typically as guilty, not guilty, or no contest.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 15 documented wrong-spelling variants for arraignment, with forms such as "araignment", "ararignment", and "arraginment". 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, "arrangement", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From arraign + -ment. 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 arraignment, spelled A-R-R-A-I-G-N-M-E-N-T, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.