explanation

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for explanation is 11 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˌɛkspləˈneɪʃən/. Corpus data places it at rank #3,360 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 3 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 17 documented wrong-spelling variants for explanation, with forms such as "epxlanation", "exlpanation", and "expalnation". 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 3 confusable-pair relationships, "exploration", "explanations", "exclamation", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Latin explanatio (“an explanation, interpretation”), from explanare (“explain”); see explain. Morphologically explain + -ation. Displaced native Old English racu. 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 explanation, spelled E-X-P-L-A-N-A-T-I-O-N, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.