contemporary

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for contemporary is 12 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /kənˈtɛm.p(ə.)ɹə.ɹi/. Corpus data places it at rank #3,050 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 2 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 19 documented wrong-spelling variants for contemporary, with forms such as "ccontemporary", "cnotemporary", and "conetmporary". 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 is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, which tends to mean the word is visually distinctive enough to stand on its own.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Medieval Latin contemporārius, from Latin con- (“with, together”) + temporārius, an adjective derived from tempus (“time”). 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 contemporary, spelled C-O-N-T-E-M-P-O-R-A-R-Y, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.