eleven

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for eleven is 6 letters long, classified as anum, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ɪˈlɛvən/. Corpus data places it at rank #5,879 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "The cardinal number occurring after ten and before twelve. Represented as 11 in Arabic digits.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 8 documented wrong-spelling variants for eleven, with forms such as "eelven", "eleevn", and "elevenn". 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 7 confusable-pair relationships, "even", "ellen", "elves", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English elleven, enleven, eleven, from Old English endleofan; from Proto-Germanic *ainalif (“one left”) (i.e., one left over after having already counted to ten), a compound of *ainaz and *-lif, from Proto-Indo-European *leyp- (“leave, remain”).… 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 eleven, spelled E-L-E-V-E-N, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.