fealty

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for fealty is 6 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈfiː.əlti/. Corpus data places it at rank #44,778 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "Fidelity to one's lord or master; the feudal obligation by which the tenant or vassal was bound to be faithful to his lord.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 9 documented wrong-spelling variants for fealty, with forms such as "efalty", "faelty", and "feallty". 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 8 confusable-pair relationships, "felt", "feat", "feast", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: Inherited from Middle English feaute, feute, from Anglo-Norman fëauté, fëuté, from Latin fidēlitās (“faithfulness”; “homage, fealty” in Medieval Latin), from fidēlis (“faithful”) + -tās (noun suffix); the modern form (for expected *feauty /ˈfjuːti/) is due … 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 fealty, spelled F-E-A-L-T-Y, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.