avocado

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for avocado is 7 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ævəˈkɑːdəʊ/. Corpus data places it at rank #15,958 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 3 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 avocado, with forms such as "aovcado", "avcoado", and "avoacdo". 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 is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, which tends to mean the word is visually distinctive enough to stand on its own.

Etymologically, the entry records: Borrowed from Latin American Spanish avocado, from the earlier aguacate, which comes from Classical Nahuatl āhuacatl (“avocado”). Doublet of abacate. Compare aguacatillo, avocadillo. The first mention can be found in the 1696 catalogue of Jamaican plants. 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 avocado, spelled A-V-O-C-A-D-O, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.