cirque

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for cirque is 6 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /sɜːk/. Corpus data places it at rank #30,366 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 3 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 8 documented wrong-spelling variants for cirque, with forms such as "ccirque", "ciqrue", and "cirqeu". 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 6 confusable-pair relationships, "clique", "cirrus", "circle", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: Borrowed from French cirque (“circular arena; cirque”), from Latin circus (“circle, ring”), from Ancient Greek κίρκος (kírkos, “circle, ring; racecourse, circus”), possibly ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *(s)ker- (“to bend; to turn”). Doublet of circus. 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 cirque, spelled C-I-R-Q-U-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.