cemetery

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for cemetery is 8 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈsɛm.ɪˌtɹi/. Corpus data places it at rank #6,444 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "A place where the dead are buried; a graveyard or memorial park.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 12 documented wrong-spelling variants for cemetery, with forms such as "ccemetery", "ceemtery", and "cemeetry". 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 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: From Middle English cimiterie, from Old French cimitiere, from Medieval Latin cimitērium, from Late Latin coemētērium, from Ancient Greek κοιμητήριον (koimētḗrion), from κοιμάω (koimáō, “I put to sleep”); compare cœmeterium. Displaced Middle English charnel… 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 cemetery, spelled C-E-M-E-T-E-R-Y, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.