evil

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for evil is 4 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈiː.vəl/. Corpus data places it at rank #1,859 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 4 documented wrong-spelling variants for evil, with forms such as "eivl", "evill", and "evli". 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 20 confusable-pair relationships, "evo", "exit", "exile", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English yvel, evel, ivel, uvel, from Old English yfel, from Proto-West Germanic *ubil, from Proto-Germanic *ubilaz, from Proto-Indo-European *h₂up(h₁)élos, a deverbal derivative of *h₂wep(h₁)-, *h₂wop(h₁)- (“treat badly”). See -le for the suppos… 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 evil, spelled E-V-I-L, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.