exorbitant

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for exorbitant is 10 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ɪɡˈzɔːbɪtənt/. Corpus data places it at rank #28,539 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "Exceeding proper limits; excessive or unduly high; extravagant.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 15 documented wrong-spelling variants for exorbitant, with forms such as "eoxrbitant", "exobritant", and "exorbbitant". 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 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 exorbitant, through Old French from Late Latin exorbitāns, present active participle of exorbitō (“to go out of the track”), from ex (“out”) + orbita (“wheel-track”); see orbit. Compare French exorbitant. 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 exorbitant, spelled E-X-O-R-B-I-T-A-N-T, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.