explicit

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for explicit is 8 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ɪkˈsplɪs.ɪt/. Corpus data places it at rank #7,560 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 2 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 12 documented wrong-spelling variants for explicit, with forms such as "epxlicit", "exlpicit", and "expilcit". 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, "exploit", "explicitly", "elicit", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: Borrowed from French explicite, from Latin explicitus (“disentangled, easy”), variant of explicātus. 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 explicit, spelled E-X-P-L-I-C-I-T, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.