enemy

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for enemy is 5 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈɛn.ə.mi/. Corpus data places it at rank #2,038 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 5 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 7 documented wrong-spelling variants for enemy, with forms such as "eenmy", "enemmy", and "enemyy". 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 11 confusable-pair relationships, "envy", "every", "enjoy", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English enemy, enemye, enmy, borrowed from Old French enemi, anemi (Modern French ennemi), from Latin inimīcus, from in- (“not”) + amīcus (“friend”). Displaced Middle English fend (“enemy”), from Old English fēond (“enemy”), which survived into … 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 enemy, spelled E-N-E-M-Y, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.