asthma

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for asthma is 6 letters long, classified as a noun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈasmə/. Corpus data places it at rank #10,650 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it. The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "A long-term respiratory condition, in which the airways may unexpectedly and suddenly narrow, often in response to an allergen, cold air, exercise, or emotional stress. Symptoms include wheezing, s...".

Our generated misspelling index lists 9 likely wrong-spelling variants for asthma, with forms such as "ashtma", "assthma", and "astham". Every one of these variants traces to a single-character edit -- an added or dropped letter, a swapped consonant, or a vowel swap -- the kind of slip a spell-checker is built to catch. It also participates in 5 confusable-pair relationships, "ASTM", "Asha", "Asta", and more, since the words sound or look close enough that writers reach for the wrong one mid-sentence.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English asma, asme, from Medieval Latin asthma, asma, from Ancient Greek ἆσθμα (âsthma, “laborious breathing, asthma”). The spelling was changed to add -th- in the 16th century to match the Greek etymological roots. The correct English form is asthma, spelled A-S-T-H-M-A.