coffin

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for coffin is 6 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈkɒfɪn/. Corpus data places it at rank #9,582 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 7 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 7 documented wrong-spelling variants for coffin, with forms such as "ccoffin", "cfofin", and "coffinn". 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 11 confusable-pair relationships, "coin", "Colin", "cousin", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English coffyn, from Old Northern French cofin (“sarcophagus", earlier "basket, coffer”), from Latin cophinus (“basket”), a loanword from Ancient Greek κόφινος (kóphinos, “a basket”). Doublet of coffer. 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 coffin, spelled C-O-F-F-I-N, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.