flee

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for flee is 4 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /fliː/. Corpus data places it at rank #9,469 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 3 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 4 documented wrong-spelling variants for flee, with forms such as "fflee", "fle", and "fllee". 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, "fly", "flu", "foe", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English flen, from Old English flēon, from Proto-West Germanic *fleuhan, from Proto-Germanic *fleuhaną, from Proto-Indo-European *plewk-, *plew- (“to fly, flow, run”). Cognate with Dutch vlieden, German fliehen, Icelandic flýja, Swedish fly, Got… 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 flee, spelled F-L-E-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.