evil-eye

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for evil eye is 8 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˌiːvl̩‿ˈaɪ/. It sits outside the most-frequent rank tiers, which is often why uncommon words generate more spelling variants per reader.Wiktionary records 3 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

No misspelling variants are generated for evil eye in our index, suggesting the orthography follows predictable English patterns.It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, which tends to mean the word is visually distinctive enough to stand on its own.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English ivel eie (“evil eye; envy”), from Old English eage yfel, a calque of Latin oculus malus, from oculus (“eye”) + malus (“bad, evil, wicked; destructive, hurtful, injurious; unfavourable, unlucky”). 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 eye, spelled E-V-I-L- -E-Y-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.