employee

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for employee is 8 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˌɛm.plɔɪˈiː/. Corpus data places it at rank #2,989 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "A person who provides labor to a company or another person.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 11 documented wrong-spelling variants for employee, with forms such as "emlpoyee", "emmployee", and "emplloyee". 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 4 confusable-pair relationships, "employer", "employees", "employ", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From employ + -ee. First attested in the early 19th century, possibly modeled after French employé. 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 employee, spelled E-M-P-L-O-Y-E-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.