expire

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for expire is 6 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ɪkˈspaɪə(ɹ)/. Corpus data places it at rank #14,121 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 7 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 expire, with forms such as "epxire", "exipre", and "expier". 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 10 confusable-pair relationships, "export", "expiry", "exposé", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English expire, from Middle French expirer, from Latin expīrō, exspīrō, from ex- (“out”) + spīrō (“breathe, be alive”). 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 expire, spelled E-X-P-I-R-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.