elder

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for elder is 5 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈeldə/. Corpus data places it at rank #6,465 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "comparative degree of old: older, greater than another in age or seniority.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 7 documented wrong-spelling variants for elder, with forms such as "edler", "eldder", and "elderr". 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 20 confusable-pair relationships, "ele", "ever", "else", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English eldre, from Old English eldra, yldra, ieldra, from Proto-Germanic *alþizô. The vowel change from a to e triggered by the following i is called umlaut or I-mutation. 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 elder, spelled E-L-D-E-R, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.