clare

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for Clare is 5 letters long, classified as aname, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /klɛə/. Corpus data places it at rank #12,020 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 13 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 6 documented wrong-spelling variants for Clare, with forms such as "calre", "cclare", and "clarre". 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 20 confusable-pair relationships, "core", "cure", "clay", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: The anglicized spelling of Irish Clár, from Old Irish clár (“plank, board”), from Proto-Celtic *klāros, *klārom (“table”). 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 Clare, spelled C-L-A-R-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.