confidence

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for confidence is 10 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈkɒn.fɪ.dəns/. Corpus data places it at rank #2,247 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 4 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 confidence, with forms such as "cconfidence", "cnofidence", and "cofnidence". 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, "confident", "confluence", "conference", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English confidence, from Latin cōnfīdentia (possibly via Old French confidence), from cōnfīdō (“believe, confide in”) from con- (“with”) + fīdō (“trust”). By surface analysis, confide + ence. 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 confidence, spelled C-O-N-F-I-D-E-N-C-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.