emerald

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for emerald is 7 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈɛm.(ə.)ɹəld/. Corpus data places it at rank #12,965 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 6 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 emerald, with forms such as "eemrald", "emearld", and "emeradl". 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 2 confusable-pair relationships, "emerged", "Esmeralda", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English emeraude, borrowed from Old French esmeraude, from Vulgar Latin *smaralda, *smaraldus, *smaraudus, variant of Latin smaragdus, from Ancient Greek σμάραγδος (smáragdos), μάραγδος (máragdos), from a Semitic language. Compare Hebrew בָּרֶקֶ… 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 emerald, spelled E-M-E-R-A-L-D, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.