dragon

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for dragon is 6 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈdɹæɡən/. Corpus data places it at rank #3,555 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 16 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 9 documented wrong-spelling variants for dragon, with forms such as "dargon", "ddragon", and "draggon". 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 10 confusable-pair relationships, "drawn", "drain", "drags", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English dragoun, borrowed from Old French dragon, from Latin dracō(n), from Ancient Greek δράκων (drákōn, “a serpent of huge size, a python, a dragon”), probably from δέρκομαι (dérkomai, “to see clearly”). Mostly displaced Old English draca (whe… 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 dragon, spelled D-R-A-G-O-N, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.