culpable

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for culpable is 8 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈkʌlpəbəl/. Corpus data places it at rank #33,193 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "Meriting condemnation, censure or blame, especially as something wrong, harmful or injurious; blameworthy, guilty.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 13 documented wrong-spelling variants for culpable, with forms such as "cculpable", "clupable", and "culapble". 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, "curable", "capable", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English culpable, from Old French culpable, from Latin culpābilis (“blameworthy”), from culpō (“to blame, condemn”), from culpa (“a fault, crime, mistake”). Compare also culprit. 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 culpable, spelled C-U-L-P-A-B-L-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.