corrupt

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for corrupt is 7 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /kəˈɹʌpt/. Corpus data places it at rank #5,669 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 9 documented wrong-spelling variants for corrupt, with forms such as "ccorrupt", "corrput", and "corruppt". 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, "corrupted", "correct", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English corrupten, derived from Latin corruptus, past participle of corrumpō (“to destroy, ruin, injure, spoil, corrupt, bribe”), from com- (“together”) + rumpō (“to break in pieces”). 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 corrupt, spelled C-O-R-R-U-P-T, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.