darling

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for darling is 7 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈdɑːlɪŋ/. Corpus data places it at rank #6,125 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 6 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 11 documented wrong-spelling variants for darling, with forms such as "adrling", "dalring", and "darilng". 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 18 confusable-pair relationships, "during", "dating", "Darwin", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: The noun is derived from Middle English dereling, derelyng (“beloved person; beloved of God, devout Christian”), from Old English dīerling, dēorling (“favourite, darling; minion”), from Proto-West Germanic *diuriling, from Proto-Germanic *diurijalingaz, fro… 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 darling, spelled D-A-R-L-I-N-G, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.