embarrass

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for embarrass is 9 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ɪmˈbæɹ.əs/. Corpus data places it at rank #16,898 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.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 embarrass, with forms such as "ebmarrass", "emabrrass", and "embararss". 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 1 confusable-pair relationship, "embarrassed", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: Borrowed from French embarrasser, from Middle French embarrasser, embarasser (“to embarrass; to block, obstruct”), from Spanish embarazar, either from Italian imbarazzare or from Portuguese embaraçar. 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 embarrass, spelled E-M-B-A-R-R-A-S-S, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.