entail

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for entail is 6 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ɛnˈteɪl/. Corpus data places it at rank #22,073 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 4 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 8 documented wrong-spelling variants for entail, with forms such as "enatil", "enntail", and "entaill". 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, "entailed", "entrails", "email", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English entaillen, from Old French entaillier, entailler (“to notch”, literally “to cut in”); from prefix en- + tailler (“to cut”), from Late Latin taliare, from Latin talea. Compare late Latin feudum talliatum (“a fee entailed, i.e., curtailed … 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 entail, spelled E-N-T-A-I-L, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.