fill

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for fill is 4 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /fɪl/. Corpus data places it at rank #2,297 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 13 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 3 documented wrong-spelling variants for fill, with forms such as "ffill", "flil", and "ifll". 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 20 confusable-pair relationships, "FL", "fit", "fix", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English fillen, fullen, from Old English fyllan (“to fill, fill up, replenish, satisfy; complete, fulfill”), from Proto-West Germanic *fullijan, from Proto-Germanic *fullijaną (“to make full, fill”), from *fullaz (“full”), from Proto-Indo-Europe… 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 fill, spelled F-I-L-L, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.