colander

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for colander is 8 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈkɒləndə(ɹ)/. Corpus data places it at rank #61,381 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "A bowl-shaped kitchen utensil with holes in it used for draining food that has been cooking in water, such as pasta.".

No frequent misspelling variants are recorded for colander in our index, suggesting the orthography either follows predictable English patterns or the word is uncommon enough that typo corpora lack signal.It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, which tends to mean the word is visually distinctive enough to stand on its own.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English colyndore, coloundour, colonur, variants of Middle English culdor, culdore, culatre, ultimately from Latin cōlātōrium, from Latin cōlum. Cognates include Italian colino and Spanish colador. 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 colander, spelled C-O-L-A-N-D-E-R, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.