example

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for example is 7 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ɪɡˈzɑːm.pəl/. Corpus data places it at rank #540 in overall English word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language.Wiktionary records 6 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 10 documented wrong-spelling variants for example, with forms such as "eaxmple", "examlpe", and "exammple". 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, "examples", "examine", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English example, exaumple, from Old French example, essaumple, from Latin exemplum (“sample, pattern, specimen, copy for imitation, etc.”, literally “what is taken out”); see exempt. Doublet of exemplum and sample. Displaced native Middle Englis… 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 example, spelled E-X-A-M-P-L-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.