cause

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for cause is 5 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /kɔːz/. Corpus data places it at rank #441 in overall English word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language.Wiktionary records 6 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 6 documented wrong-spelling variants for cause, with forms such as "acuse", "casue", and "caues". 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, "cue", "CSE", "cute", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: * From Middle English cause (also with the sense of “a thing”), borrowed from Old French cause (“a cause, a thing”), borrowed from Latin causa (“reason, sake, cause”), from Proto-Italic *kaussā, which is of unknown origin. Doublet of chose (“(law) a thing; … 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 cause, spelled C-A-U-S-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.