emigrate

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for emigrate is 8 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈɛmɪɡɹeɪt/. Corpus data places it at rank #33,220 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "To leave the country in which one lives, especially one's native country, in order to reside elsewhere.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 11 documented wrong-spelling variants for emigrate, with forms such as "eimgrate", "emgirate", and "emigarte". 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 3 confusable-pair relationships, "emirate", "Emirates", "emigrant", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Latin emigratus, perfect passive participle of emigro (“to move away, remove, depart from a place”), from ex- (“out of, from”) + migro (“to move, remove, depart”). 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 emigrate, spelled E-M-I-G-R-A-T-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.