demolition

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for demolition is 10 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˌdɛm.əˈlɪʃ.ən/. Corpus data places it at rank #12,574 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "The process of demolishing or destroying buildings or other structures.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 15 documented wrong-spelling variants for demolition, with forms such as "ddemolition", "demloition", and "demmolition". 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 4 confusable-pair relationships, "demotion", "deposition", "devolution", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Old French demolition, from Latin dēmōlītiō (“a tearing down”). Equivalent to demolish + -ion. 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 demolition, spelled D-E-M-O-L-I-T-I-O-N, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.