decade

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for decade is 6 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈdɛkeɪd/. Corpus data places it at rank #2,886 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 9 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 8 documented wrong-spelling variants for decade, with forms such as "dceade", "ddecade", and "deacde". 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 20 confusable-pair relationships, "decay", "decal", "decaf", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English decade, from Old French decade, from Late Latin decādem (“(set of) ten”), from Ancient Greek δεκάς (dekás), from δέκα (déka, “ten”). In reference to a span of ten years, originally a clipping of the phrase decade of years. By surface ana… 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 decade, spelled D-E-C-A-D-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.