Dalai Lama

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for Dalai Lama is 10 letters long, classified as a noun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈdælaɪ ˈlɑːmə/. It sits outside the most-frequent rank tiers, which is often why uncommon words generate more spelling variants per reader. The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "The supreme head of Tibetan Buddhism, believed to be an incarnation of Avalokitesvara, and considered the spiritual leader of the Tibetan people.".

No misspelling variants are generated for Dalai Lama in our index, suggesting the orthography follows predictable English patterns. 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: Borrowed from Tibetan ཏཱ་ལའི་བླ་མ (tā la'i bla ma), compound of Mongolian ᠳᠠᠯᠠᠢ (dalai, “ocean”) + Tibetan བླ་མ (bla ma, “lama”). 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 Dalai Lama, spelled D-A-L-A-I- -L-A-M-A, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.