cajole

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for cajole is 6 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /kəˈdʒəʊl/. Corpus data places it at rank #75,697 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "To persuade someone to do something which they are reluctant to do, especially by flattery or promises; to coax.".

No frequent misspelling variants are recorded for cajole in our index, suggesting the orthography either follows predictable English patterns or the word is uncommon enough that typo corpora lack signal.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 cajoler, probably a blend of Middle French cageoler (“chatter like a jay”) (from gajole, dialectal diminutive of geai (“jaybird”)) + Old French gaioler (“entice into a cage”), which is from Medieval Latin gabiola, from Late Latin caveol… 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 cajole, spelled C-A-J-O-L-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.