company

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for company is 7 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈkʌmp(ə)ni/. Corpus data places it at rank #224 in overall English word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language.Wiktionary records 11 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 11 documented wrong-spelling variants for company, with forms such as "ccompany", "cmopany", and "comapny". 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 5 confusable-pair relationships, "comply", "compare", "compass", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English companye (“a team; companionship”), from Old French compaignie (“companionship”) (Modern French: compagnie), possibly from Late Latin *compania, but this word is not attested. Old French compaignie is equivalent to Old French compaignon … 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 company, spelled C-O-M-P-A-N-Y, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.