courage

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for courage is 7 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈkʌ.ɹɪd͡ʒ/. Corpus data places it at rank #4,148 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 3 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 courage, with forms such as "ccourage", "coruage", and "couarge". 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 8 confusable-pair relationships, "course", "curate", "courant", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English corage, from Old French corage (French courage), from Vulgar Latin *corāticum, from Latin cor (“heart”). Distantly related to cardiac (“of the heart”), which is from Greek, but from the same Proto-Indo-European root. Displaced Middle Eng… 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 courage, spelled C-O-U-R-A-G-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.