congratulation

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for congratulation is 14 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /kənˌɡɹæd͡ʒʊˈleɪʃ(ə)n/. Corpus data places it at rank #40,180 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "The act of congratulating.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 22 documented wrong-spelling variants for congratulation, with forms such as "ccongratulation", "cnogratulation", and "cognratulation". 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, "congratulations", "congratulating", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English congratulacion, from Middle French congratulation or its etymon Latin congrātulātiō, from congrātulor (“to congratulate”). By surface analysis, congratulate + -ion. 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 congratulation, spelled C-O-N-G-R-A-T-U-L-A-T-I-O-N, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.