clever

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for clever is 6 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈklɛv.ə/. Corpus data places it at rank #5,014 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 12 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 9 documented wrong-spelling variants for clever, with forms such as "cclever", "celver", and "cleevr". 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 17 confusable-pair relationships, "cover", "Clive", "clove", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From East Anglian dialectal English cliver (“expert at seizing”), from Middle English cliver (“tenacious”). * perhaps from Old English *clifer, clibbor (“clinging”); * or perhaps from Dutch, Low German, or East/Saterland Frisian (compare kluftich (“clever, … 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 clever, spelled C-L-E-V-E-R, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.