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dyslexia

/(ˌ)dɪsˈlɛk.si.ə/noun

dyslexia is a noun meaning “A learning disability characterized by reading and writing difficulties” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled D-Y-S-L-E-X-I-A and has 4 syllables, and it appears 1.0 times per million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data). The plural of dyslexia is dyslexias.

What does dyslexia mean?

noun

  1. 1

    A learning disability characterized by reading and writing difficulties.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How do you pronounce dyslexia?

  • /(ˌ)dɪsˈlɛk.si.ə/

Dyslexia has 4 syllables (counted from its American pronunciation in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary).

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: LL-Q1860_(eng)-Vealhurl-dyslexia.wav, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).

Forms of dyslexia

  • dyslexias plural

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How common is dyslexia?

Dyslexia appears 1.0 times per million words in written English, the 28,214th most frequent word form in the list.

Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).

Dyslexia in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese

In the sense learning disability:

LanguageWords
Frenchdyslexie
GermanLegasthenie, Dyslexie
Portuguesedislexia
Spanishdislexia

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Translations are Wiktionary's, by sense; a linked word has its own PlainSpell page.

Where does dyslexia come from?

Learned borrowing from French dyslexie and/or German Dyslexie, coined by German ophthalmologist Rudolf Berlin in 1887, from dys- + lexis + -ia, from Ancient Greek δυσ- (dus-) + λέξις (léxis, “diction”, “word”), from Ancient Greek λέγω (légō, “to speak”), ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *leg- (“to collect, gather; to speak”). The term was coined with λέξις (léxis) being taken to mean "reading," likely due to semantic conflation of Greek λέγω (légō, “to speak”) and Latin legō (“to read”). By surface analysis, dys- + lex(is) + -ia.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).