emphasize

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for emphasize is 9 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈɛm.fə.saɪz/. Corpus data places it at rank #11,373 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "To stress, give emphasis or extra weight to (something).".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 13 documented wrong-spelling variants for emphasize, with forms such as "emhpasize", "emmphasize", and "empahsize". 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, "emphasized", "emphasis", "emphasise", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: Latin, from Ancient Greek – see emphasis. 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 emphasize, spelled E-M-P-H-A-S-I-Z-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.