extortion

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for extortion is 9 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ɪkˈstɔːʃən/. Corpus data places it at rank #19,833 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "The practice of extorting money or other property by the use of force or threats.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 14 documented wrong-spelling variants for extortion, with forms such as "etxortion", "exotrtion", and "extoriton". 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 1 confusable-pair relationship, "exertion", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Anglo-Norman extorcion, extorcioun, extorsioun, from Late Latin extortiō, from extorqueō. 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 extortion, spelled E-X-T-O-R-T-I-O-N, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.