cannon

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for cannon is 6 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈkæn.ən/. Corpus data places it at rank #6,878 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 14 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 5 documented wrong-spelling variants for cannon, with forms such as "acnnon", "cannno", and "cannonn". 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 20 confusable-pair relationships, "canon", "canoe", "canny", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: Attested from around 1400 as Middle English canon, canoun, from Old French canon, from Italian cannone, from Latin canna, from Ancient Greek κάννα (kánna, “reed”), from Akkadian 𒄀 (qanû, “reed”), from Sumerian 𒄀𒈾 (gi.na). Doublet of canyon. This spelling… 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 cannon, spelled C-A-N-N-O-N, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.