delves

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for delves is 6 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /dɛlvz/. Corpus data places it at rank #41,077 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "third-person singular simple present indicative of delve".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 9 documented wrong-spelling variants for delves, with forms such as "ddelves", "delevs", and "dellves". 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 12 confusable-pair relationships, "devs", "dives", "doves", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From delve + -s. 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 delves, spelled D-E-L-V-E-S, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.