ember

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for ember is 5 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈɛm.bə/. Corpus data places it at rank #30,019 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 2 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 6 documented wrong-spelling variants for ember, with forms such as "ebmer", "embber", and "emberr". 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, "ever", "emir", "enter", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English embre, eymbre, aymer, eymere, emeri, from Old English ǣmyrġe, from Proto-West Germanic *aimuʀjā, from Proto-Germanic *aimuzjǭ, a compound of *aimaz + *uzjǭ. The latter is from Proto-Indo-European *h₁ews- (“to burn”). The b is intrusive a… 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 ember, spelled E-M-B-E-R, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.