excuse

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for excuse is 6 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ɪkˈskjuːz/. Corpus data places it at rank #2,676 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 4 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 8 documented wrong-spelling variants for excuse, with forms such as "ecxuse", "exccuse", and "excsue". 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 7 confusable-pair relationships, "exposé", "execute", "excused", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English excusen (verb) and excuse (noun), borrowed from Old French escuser (verb) and excuse (noun), from Latin excūsō, excūsāre (“to excuse, allege in excuse, literally, free from a charge”), from ex (“out”) + causa (“a charge”); see cause, acc… 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 excuse, spelled E-X-C-U-S-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.