escape

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for escape is 6 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ɪˈskeɪp/. Corpus data places it at rank #2,292 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 6 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 escape, with forms such as "ecsape", "esacpe", and "escaep". 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 2 confusable-pair relationships, "estate", "escaped", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English escapen, from Anglo-Norman and Old Northern French escaper ( = Old French eschaper, modern French échapper), from Vulgar Latin *excappāre (“to escape a garment, get out of one's clothing”, literally “to free oneself from one's cape”), fr… 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 escape, spelled E-S-C-A-P-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.