divorce

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for divorce is 7 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /dɪˈvɔːs/. Corpus data places it at rank #3,874 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 4 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 10 documented wrong-spelling variants for divorce, with forms such as "ddivorce", "diovrce", and "divocre". 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 3 confusable-pair relationships, "divorced", "diverse", "diverge", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: Derived from Old French divorce, from Latin dīvortium, from dīvertere (“to turn aside”), from dī- (“apart”) + vertere (“to turn”); see verse. 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 divorce, spelled D-I-V-O-R-C-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.