exasperate

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for exasperate is 10 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ɪɡˈzæsp(ə)ɹeɪt/. It sits outside the most-frequent rank tiers, which is often why uncommon words generate more spelling variants per reader.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "To tax the patience of; irk, frustrate, vex, provoke, annoy; to make angry.".

No frequent misspelling variants are recorded for exasperate in our index, suggesting the orthography either follows predictable English patterns or the word is uncommon enough that typo corpora lack signal.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: First attested in 1534; borrowed from Latin exasperātus, the perfect passive participle of Latin exasperō (see -ate (verb-forming suffix) and -ate (adjective-forming suffix)), from ex (“out of; thoroughly”) + asperō (“to make rough”), from asper (“rough”). … 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 exasperate, spelled E-X-A-S-P-E-R-A-T-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.