exorcist

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for exorcist is 8 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈɛk.sɔː.sɪst/. Corpus data places it at rank #31,168 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "A person, especially a priest or priestess, who is a masterful practitioner in purification and exorcism to force out evil spirits and/or demons from a living being.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 12 documented wrong-spelling variants for exorcist, with forms such as "eoxrcist", "exocrist", and "exorccist". 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, "exercise", "exorcism", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle French exorciste, from Latin exorcista, from Ancient Greek ἐξορκιστής (exorkistḗs). 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 exorcist, spelled E-X-O-R-C-I-S-T, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.