delete

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for delete is 6 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /dɪˈliːt/. Corpus data places it at rank #4,935 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 3 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 delete, with forms such as "ddelete", "deelte", and "deleet". 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 15 confusable-pair relationships, "delta", "delve", "Delle", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Latin dēlētus, past participle of dēlēre (“destroy, blot out, efface”), from dēlēvī, originally perf. tense of dēlinere (“to daub, erase by smudging”), from dē- (“from, away”) + linere (“to smear, wipe”). Original sense first appears c. 1495. In common… 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 delete, spelled D-E-L-E-T-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.