feminine

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for feminine is 8 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈfɛmɪnɪn/. Corpus data places it at rank #8,144 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 8 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 11 documented wrong-spelling variants for feminine, with forms such as "efminine", "feimnine", and "femiinne". 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 2 confusable-pair relationships, "feminist", "feminism", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English feminine, femynyne, femynyn, from Old French feminin, feminine, from Latin fēminīnus, from fēmina (“woman”), from Proto-Indo-European *dʰeh₁-m̥h₁n-eh₂ (“(the one) nursing, breastfeeding”). Related to fetus, feminism, filial, fellatio. 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 feminine, spelled F-E-M-I-N-I-N-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.