confession

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for confession is 10 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /kənˈfɛʃən/. Corpus data places it at rank #8,527 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 6 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 confession, with forms such as "cconfession", "cnofession", and "cofnession". 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 8 confusable-pair relationships, "confusion", "confessor", "conversion", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English confessioun, from Old French confession, from Latin cōnfessiō, cōnfessiōnem (“confession, acknowledgment, creed or avowal of one's faith”). Displaced native Old English andetnes. Doublet of confessio. Morphologically confess + -ion. Sens… 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 confession, spelled C-O-N-F-E-S-S-I-O-N, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.