delight
/dəˈlaɪt/
"delight" is a 7-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“delight” is a regularly-used English word, ranked #7,440 in English word frequency and used as a noun.
- #7,440
- frequency rank, English
- 7
- letters
- 11
- tracked misspellings
- 4
- confusable pairs
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed May 6, 2026) - Joy; pleasure.
Visual similarity to commonly confused words
How many letter changes separate each confused pair (Levenshtein distance, normalized).
Source: PlainSpell confusable corpus (Wiktionary, CC BY-SA).
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | delight |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /dəˈlaɪt/ |
| Letters | 7 |
| Frequency rank | #7,440 |
| Misspellings tracked | 11 |
| Confusable pairs | 4 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Where “delight” sits in English frequency
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for delight is 7 letters long, classified as a noun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /dəˈlaɪt/. Corpus data places it at rank #7,440 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text. Wiktionary records 2 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our generated misspelling index lists 11 likely wrong-spelling variants for delight, with forms such as "ddelight", "deilght", and "delgiht". Every one of these variants traces to a single-character edit -- an added or dropped letter, a swapped consonant, or a vowel swap -- the kind of slip a spell-checker is built to catch. It also participates in 4 confusable-pair relationships, "Dwight", "delights", "delighted", and more, since the words sound or look close enough that writers reach for the wrong one mid-sentence.
Etymologically, the entry records: Attested from the 13th century, from Middle English delite, from Old French deleiter, deliter, from Latin dēlectāre (“to delight, please”), frequentative of dēlicere (“to allure, entice”), from dē- (“away”) + laciō (“to lure, to deceive”), from Proto-Italic… The correct English form is delight, spelled D-E-L-I-G-H-T.
Definition
- 1Joy; pleasure.
- 2Something that gives great joy or pleasure.
Etymology
Attested from the 13th century, from Middle English delite, from Old French deleiter, deliter, from Latin dēlectāre (“to delight, please”), frequentative of dēlicere (“to allure, entice”), from dē- (“away”) + laciō (“to lure, to deceive”), from Proto-Italic *lakjō (“to draw, pull”), of unknown ultimate origin. Doublet of delect. Related with delectation, delicate, delicious and dilettante. The modern unetymological spelling (instead of expected delite) is influenced by light and other words ending in -ight, such as might, bright, etc. The -gh- may also be an attempt to represent the Latin -c-; compare obsolete indight for indict.
Synonyms
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: ddelight,deilght,delgiht,deligght,delighht,delightt,deligth,delihgt,dellight,dleight,edlight
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
How far each generated variant is from the correct spelling of delight - counted as single-character edits (an insertion, a deletion, or a substituted letter). The larger the bar, the easier the typo is to spot; one-edit slips are the ones that sneak past readers.
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA); frequency ordering uses the FrequencyWords open word-frequency list (2018 English corpus, MIT). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Using “delight”
The practical upshot for anyone who landed here from a spell-check.
- The one correct English spelling is D-E-L-I-G-H-T - every other letter order is a misspelling in standard orthography.
- Say it as /dəˈlaɪt/ (IPA); tap the speaker on the pronunciation badge to hear it where audio exists.
- Don't mix it up with “Dwight” - see the side-by-side comparison. delight vs Dwight
- Browse more English words and confusable pairs in the same reference. English words
Data Source
Wiktionary (via kaikki.org), licensed under CC BY-SA & GFDL. Word ordering uses an open word-frequency list; misspelling variants are generated by edit-distance from the correct headword.