asunder

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for asunder is 7 letters long, classified as an adverb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /əˈsʌndə/. Corpus data places it at rank #46,915 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it. The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "Into separate parts or pieces.".

Our generated misspelling index lists 10 likely wrong-spelling variants for asunder, with forms such as "asnuder", "assunder", and "asudner". Each variant is a distinct typo pattern an edit-distance generator flags, typically a doubled-consonant error, a silent-letter drop, or a vowel substitution. It also participates in 1 confusable-pair relationship, "Arundel", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English asunder, asondre, onsunder, on sondre, from Old English asundran, onsundrum (“asunder, apart, privately”), from Proto-Germanic *sunder, *sundraz. Equivalent to a- + sunder. Cognate with Danish sønder, Swedish sönder, Dutch zonder, German… 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 asunder, spelled A-S-U-N-D-E-R, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.