bastille

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for Bastille is 8 letters long, classified as aname, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /bæˈstiːl/. Corpus data places it at rank #27,375 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "A former fortress and prison in Paris, France, the storming of which in 1789 began the French Revolution.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 10 documented wrong-spelling variants for Bastille, with forms such as "abstille", "basitlle", and "basstille". 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 French Bastille, from bastille (“fortress”): see further at the English entry bastille. The building was known in full as the Bastille Saint-Antoine, and was a former fortress used as a prison by the French monarchy in the 17th and 18th centur… 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 Bastille, spelled B-A-S-T-I-L-L-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.