compassion

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for compassion is 10 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /kəmˈpæʃ.ən/. Corpus data places it at rank #7,664 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 2 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 14 documented wrong-spelling variants for compassion, with forms such as "ccompassion", "cmopassion", and "comapssion". 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 4 confusable-pair relationships, "compulsion", "compression", "companion", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English compassioun, compassion, from Old French compassion, from Ecclesiastical Latin compassio (“sympathy”), from Latin compati, past participle compassus (“to suffer together with”), from com- (“together”) + pati (“to suffer”); see passion. 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 compassion, spelled C-O-M-P-A-S-S-I-O-N, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.