custom

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for custom is 6 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈkʌstəm/. Corpus data places it at rank #3,421 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 8 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 custom, with forms such as "ccustom", "csutom", and "cusotm". 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 4 confusable-pair relationships, "customs", "customer", "castor", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: PIE word *ḱóm PIE word *swé From Middle English custume, borrowed from Anglo-Norman custume, inherited from Latin consuētūdinem, a noun derived from cōnsuēscō, from con- (“with”) + suēscō (“become used or accustomed to”). Doublet of costume, consuetude, … 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 custom, spelled C-U-S-T-O-M, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.