attention
/əˈtɛn.ʃn̩/noun, interjection
attention is spelled A-T-T-E-N-T-I-O-N. The wrong spelling people search most is atention: about 90 Bing searches a month in the United States (September 2025 to August 2026), about 1 in 69 of all searches for the word. Attention is a noun meaning “Mental focus”. The plural of attention is attentions.
How many letters and syllables are in attention?
| Letters | 9: A-T-T-E-N-T-I-O-N |
|---|---|
| Syllables | 3 (from its American pronunciation) |
| In writing | 129 times per million words; the 810th most frequent word form |
| Wrong spellings searched | 2; the most searched, atention, about 90 Bing searches a month (all of them) |
| Same letters |
Sources: letters and syllables from the English Wiktionary's hyphenation or pronunciation and the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary; written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media); Bing searches in the United States: the average month from September 2025 to August 2026 (Microsoft Advertising keyword data through DataForSEO, read September 30, 2026); rhymes and same-letter words are computed by PlainSpell from its own word list.
How do you spell attention?
Attention is spelled A-T-T-E-N-T-I-O-N. 2 wrong spellings are searched or written often enough to measure; together they are about 1 in 40 of the searches for attention in either form.
Bing searches in the United States: the average month from September 2025 to August 2026 (Microsoft Advertising keyword data through DataForSEO, read September 30, 2026). Wrong spellings are taken from Wiktionary entries tagged "misspelling" and its obsolete or nonstandard forms, Wikipedia's Lists of common misspellings and the codespell dictionary, then measured. The proofreader's marks show the change that corrects each one.
How common is attention?
Attention appears 129 times per million words in written English, the 810th most frequent word form in the list.
Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).
How do you pronounce attention?
- /əˈtɛn.ʃn̩/
Attention has 3 syllables (counted from its American pronunciation in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary).
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: LL-Q1860_(eng)-Naomi_Persephone_Amethyst_(NaomiAmethyst)-attention.wav, En-us-attention.ogg, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).
What rhymes with attention?
No other word on PlainSpell ends in the same sounds as attention.
Spelled with the same letters in another order: tentation.
Computed by PlainSpell from the pronunciations in the English Wiktionary (dump of September 2, 2026): a rhyme shares every sound from the last stressed vowel to the end; ordered by written frequency (wordfreq 3.1).
Forms of attention
- attentions plural
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
What does attention mean?
The meanings the English Wiktionary records, quoted as written there (source below).
noun
- 1
Mental focus.
Please direct your attention to the following words.
- 2
An action or remark expressing concern for or interest in someone or something, especially romantic interest.
- 3
A state of alertness in the standing position.
The company will now come to attention.
- 4
A kind of prioritisation technique in neural networks that assigns soft weights between tokens from two (or more) input sequences in order to compute the required output.
interjection
- 1
Used as a command to bring soldiers to the attention position.
- 2
A call for people to be quiet/stop doing what they are presently doing and pay heed to what they are to be told or shown.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
How do you abbreviate attention?
Wiktionary records 2 abbreviations of attention: attensh, attn.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
Attention in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese
| Language | Words |
|---|---|
| French | attention , attentions , garde à vous |
| German | Aufmerksamkeit, Beachtung, Wachsamkeit, Attention , Achtung , Vorsicht |
| Portuguese | atenção , sentido |
| Spanish | atención |
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Translations are Wiktionary's, by sense; a linked word has its own PlainSpell page.
Where does attention come from?
From Middle English attencioun, borrowed from Latin attentio, attentionis, from attendere, past participle attentus (“to attend, give heed to”); see attend. Equivalent to attend + -tion.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).