exact

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for exact is 5 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ɪɡˈzækt/. Corpus data places it at rank #2,944 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 exact, with forms such as "eaxct", "exacct", and "exactt". 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, "exit", "exam", "exec", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Latin exāctus (the verb via Middle English exact), perfect passive participle of exigō (“demand, claim as due; measure by a standard, weigh, test”), from ex (“out”) + agō (“drive”). 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 exact, spelled E-X-A-C-T, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.