chancellor
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
Letters
10 characters
Language
English
word origin
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "chancellor", 10-letters, with pronunciation in International Phonetic Alphabet notation, etymology traced through Germanic and Romance roots where applicable, common misspelling variants catalogued from Hunspell error dictionaries, and usage frequency ranked against the top 100,000 English words in the Wordfreq corpus. PlainSpell covers English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and German spelling with confusable-pair detection that highlights visually and phonetically similar words. This entry for "chancellor" includes synonyms, antonyms, homophones, and cross-language translation pointers sourced from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org extract. Whether you are verifying the correct spelling of "chancellor" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
chancellor is aEnglishnoun. It means: A senior secretary or official with administrative or legal duties, sometimes in charge of some area of government such as finance or justice. Pronounced /ˈtʃɑːnsələ/. It ranks #5,767 in English word frequency.
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See how chancellor compares against similar English words.
Browse all word comparisons →| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | chancellor |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /ˈtʃɑːnsələ/ |
| Letters | 10 |
| Frequency rank | #5,767 |
| Misspellings tracked | 14 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for chancellor is 10 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈtʃɑːnsələ/. Corpus data places it at rank #5,767 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 8 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 14 documented wrong-spelling variants for chancellor, with forms such as "cahncellor", "cchancellor", and "chacnellor". 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 Anglo-Norman or Middle English chaunceler, chanceler, canceler (“chief administrative or executive officer of a ruler; chancellor, secretary; private secretary, scribe; Lord Chancellor of England; officer of the ruler's exchequer; a high administrative… 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 chancellor, spelled C-H-A-N-C-E-L-L-O-R, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1A senior secretary or official with administrative or legal duties, sometimes in charge of some area of government such as finance or justice.
- 2A senior secretary or official with administrative or legal duties, sometimes in charge of some area of government such as finance or justice.
- 3The head of the government in some German-speaking countries.
- 4A senior record keeper of a cathedral; a senior legal officer for a bishop or diocese in charge of hearing cases involving ecclesiastical law.
- 5The head of a university, sometimes purely ceremonial.
- 6The foreman of a jury.
- 7The chief judge of a court of chancery (that is, one exercising equity jurisdiction).
- 8A fairy chess piece which combines the moves of the rook and the knight.
Etymology
From Anglo-Norman or Middle English chaunceler, chanceler, canceler (“chief administrative or executive officer of a ruler; chancellor, secretary; private secretary, scribe; Lord Chancellor of England; officer of the ruler's exchequer; a high administrative or executive officer (for example, a deputy or representative of a bishop; the head of a university)”), from Old French cancelier, chancelier (“chancellor”), from Late Latin cancellārius (“secretary; doorkeeper, porter; usher of a court of law stationed at the bars separating the public from the judges”), from Latin cancellī (plural of cancellus (“grate; bars, barrier; railings”), diminutive of cancer (“grid; barrier”), from Proto-Italic *karkros (“enclosure”), ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *(s)ker- (“to bend, turn”)) + -ārius (suffix forming nouns denoting an agent of use). The word was present as Late Old English canceler, cancheler, from Norman cancheler, but was displaced in the 13th century by the Old French and Anglo-Norman forms mentioned above.
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: cahncellor,cchancellor,chacnellor,chanccellor,chancellorr,chancellro,chancelolr,chancelor,chanclelor,chanecllor,channcellor,chhancellor,chnacellor,hcancellor
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for chancellor
Misspelling Variants of "chancellor"
Frequency rank: #5,767 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter C in our English index: