arrest

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for arrest is 6 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /əˈɹɛst/. Corpus data places it at rank #2,713 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 8 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 6 documented wrong-spelling variants for arrest, with forms such as "arerst", "arest", and "arresst". 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 14 confusable-pair relationships, "Ayres", "artist", "attest", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English arest (noun) and aresten (verb), from Old French areste (noun) and arester (“to stay, stop”, verb), from Vulgar Latin *arrestō, from Latin ad- (“to”) + restō (“to stop, remain behind, stay back”), from re- (“back”) + stō (“to stand”), fr… 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 arrest, spelled A-R-R-E-S-T, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.