case

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for case is 4 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /keɪs/. Corpus data places it at rank #255 in overall English word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language.Wiktionary records 10 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 case, with forms such as "acse", "caes", and "casse". 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, "cs", "CE", "cat", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English cas, from Old French cas (“an event”), from Latin cāsus (“a falling, a fall; accident, event, occurrence; occasion, opportunity; noun case”), perfect passive participle of cadō (“to fall, to drop”). 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 case, spelled C-A-S-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.