deleterious

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for deleterious is 11 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˌdɛl.ɪˈtɪə̯.ɹi.əs/. Corpus data places it at rank #40,647 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 2 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 15 documented wrong-spelling variants for deleterious, with forms such as "ddeleterious", "deelterious", and "deleetrious". 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 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: Adapted borrowing (1640s; 1582 as deletorious) of New Latin dēlētērius, dēlētōrius + -ous, from Ancient Greek δηλητήριος (dēlētḗrios, “noxious, deleterious”), from δηλητήρ (dēlētḗr, “a destroyer”), from δηλέομαι (dēléomai, “I hurt, damage, spoil, waste”). N… 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 deleterious, spelled D-E-L-E-T-E-R-I-O-U-S, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.