favourable

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for favourable is 10 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈfeɪv(ə)ɹəbəl/. Corpus data places it at rank #14,322 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 5 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 15 documented wrong-spelling variants for favourable, with forms such as "afvourable", "faovurable", and "favoruable". 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, "favourably", "favorable", "favorably", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English favourable, from Old French favorable, from Latin favōrābilis, from favor. By surface analysis, favour + -able. 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 favourable, spelled F-A-V-O-U-R-A-B-L-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.