chastity

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for chastity is 8 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈt͡ʃastɪti/. Corpus data places it at rank #24,110 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "The quality of being chaste: the state of abstaining from any sexual activity considered immoral; avoidance of sexual sins.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 13 documented wrong-spelling variants for chastity, with forms such as "cahstity", "cchastity", and "chasitty". 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 2 confusable-pair relationships, "chatty", "charity", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English chastite, from Old French chasteté, a semi-learned adaptation of Latin castitas, equivalent to chaste + -ity. 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 chastity, spelled C-H-A-S-T-I-T-Y, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.