exorcism

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for exorcism is 8 letters long, classified as a noun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈɛk.sɔː.sɪ.zəm/. Corpus data places it at rank #33,227 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it. The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "The ritual act of driving out evil spirits from persons, places or things that are possessed by them.".

Our generated misspelling index lists 12 likely wrong-spelling variants for exorcism, with forms such as "eoxrcism", "exocrism", and "exorccism". Every one of these variants traces to a single-character edit -- an added or dropped letter, a swapped consonant, or a vowel swap -- the kind of slip a spell-checker is built to catch. It also participates in 2 confusable-pair relationships, "exorcist", "exercise", since the words sound or look close enough that writers reach for the wrong one mid-sentence.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Old French exorciser, from Late Latin exorcizō, from Ancient Greek ἐξορκίζω (exorkízō, “to ward off, to charge under oath, adjure”), from ἐξ (ex) + ὅρκος (hórkos). The correct English form is exorcism, spelled E-X-O-R-C-I-S-M.