competence

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for competence is 10 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈkɒm.pə.təns/. Corpus data places it at rank #13,307 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 6 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 16 documented wrong-spelling variants for competence, with forms such as "ccompetence", "cmopetence", and "comeptence". 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 2 confusable-pair relationships, "competent", "competency", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: Borrowed from Middle French compétence, from Late Latin competentia. Doublet of competency. 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 competence, spelled C-O-M-P-E-T-E-N-C-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.