attempt

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for attempt is 7 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /əˈtɛmpt/. Corpus data places it at rank #1,476 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 5 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 9 documented wrong-spelling variants for attempt, with forms such as "atempt", "atetmpt", and "attemmpt". 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 3 confusable-pair relationships, "attest", "attempts", "attempted", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *h₂éd Proto-Italic *ad Proto-Italic *ad- Latin ad- Latin temptō Latin attemptōder. Old French atempterbor. Middle English attempten English attempt Late 14th century, as Middle English attempten, from Old French atempter, … 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 attempt, spelled A-T-T-E-M-P-T, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.