embezzle

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for embezzle is 8 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ɪmˈbɛz.əl/. Corpus data places it at rank #93,659 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "To steal or misappropriate money that one has been trusted with, especially to steal money from the organisation for which one works.".

No frequent misspelling variants are recorded for embezzle in our index, suggesting the orthography either follows predictable English patterns or the word is uncommon enough that typo corpora lack signal.It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, which tends to mean the word is visually distinctive enough to stand on its own.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English embesilen, from Anglo-Norman embesiler, embesillier, embeseillier (“to steal, cause to disappear”), from em- + Old French besillier (“to torment, destroy, gouge”), of unknown origin. 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 embezzle, spelled E-M-B-E-Z-Z-L-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.