children

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for children is 8 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈt͡ʃɪldɹən/. Corpus data places it at rank #318 in overall English word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language.Wiktionary records 2 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 13 documented wrong-spelling variants for children, with forms such as "cchildren", "chhildren", and "chidlren". 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 1 confusable-pair relationship, "childrens", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English children, alteration of earlier childre ("children"; > English dialectal childer), from Old English ċildru, ċildra (“children”), nominative and accusative plural of ċild (“child”), equivalent to child + -ren. 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 children, spelled C-H-I-L-D-R-E-N, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.