contain

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for contain is 7 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /kənˈteɪn/. Corpus data places it at rank #2,984 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 5 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 10 documented wrong-spelling variants for contain, with forms such as "ccontain", "cnotain", and "conatin". 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 13 confusable-pair relationships, "curtain", "contains", "contained", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English, borrowed from Old French contenir, from Latin continēre (“to hold or keep together, comprise, contain”), combined form of con- (“together”) + teneō (“to hold”). 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 contain, spelled C-O-N-T-A-I-N, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.