brilliant

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for brilliant is 9 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈbɹɪljənt/. Corpus data places it at rank #2,716 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 12 documented wrong-spelling variants for brilliant, with forms such as "bbrilliant", "birlliant", and "briliant". 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 2 confusable-pair relationships, "brilliantly", "brilliance", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: Borrowed from French brillant (late 17th century), present participle of the verb briller, from Italian brillare, possibly from Latin berillus, beryllus (“a beryl, gem, eyeglass”), from Ancient Greek βήρυλλος (bḗrullos, “beryl”). 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 brilliant, spelled B-R-I-L-L-I-A-N-T, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.