clergy

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for clergy is 6 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈklɜːdʒi/. Corpus data places it at rank #10,511 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "A body of persons, such as priests, who are trained and ordained for religious service.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 10 documented wrong-spelling variants for clergy, with forms such as "cclergy", "celrgy", and "clegry". 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 10 confusable-pair relationships, "clerk", "cleric", "clerks", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English clergie (attested in the 13th century), from Old French clergie (“learned men”), from Late Latin clēricātus, from Latin clēricus (“one ordained for religious services”), from Ancient Greek κληρικός (klērikós, “of the clergy”). Equivalent… 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 clergy, spelled C-L-E-R-G-Y, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.