embolism

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for embolism is 8 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈɛmbəlɪzəm/. Corpus data places it at rank #38,384 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 12 documented wrong-spelling variants for embolism, with forms such as "ebmolism", "embbolism", and "embloism". 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 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: The term was coined in 1848 by Rudolf Virchow. From Old French embolisme (“intercalation of days in a calendar to correct errors”), from Late Latin embolismus, from Ancient Greek ἐμβολισμός (embolismós, “intercalary”), from ἐμβάλλω (embállō, “to insert, thr… 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 embolism, spelled E-M-B-O-L-I-S-M, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.