delicatessen

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for delicatessen is 12 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˌdɛlɪkəˈtɛsən/. Corpus data places it at rank #54,115 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "A shop that sells cooked or prepared foods ready for serving.".

No misspelling variants are generated for delicatessen 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: First attested 1864. From German Delikatessen, plural of Delikatesse (“delicacy, fine food”), at the time also spelt Delicatesse(n), from French délicatesse, from délicat (“fine”), from Latin delicatus (“alluring”). The sense of store is much more recent, o… 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 delicatessen, spelled D-E-L-I-C-A-T-E-S-S-E-N, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.