committee

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for committee is 9 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /kəˈmɪt.i/. Corpus data places it at rank #1,046 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 3 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 committee, with forms such as "ccommittee", "cmomittee", and "comimttee". 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 3 confusable-pair relationships, "committees", "committed", "committal", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From commit + -ee, or else revival of Anglo-Norman commite, past participle of commettre (“to commit”), from Latin committere, from con- (“with”) + mittere (“to send”). The OED3 prefers the first etymology. 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 committee, spelled C-O-M-M-I-T-T-E-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.