forgive

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for forgive is 7 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /fə(ɹ)ˈɡɪv/. Corpus data places it at rank #4,672 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 6 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 10 documented wrong-spelling variants for forgive, with forms such as "fforgive", "fogrive", and "forggive". 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 5 confusable-pair relationships, "forgiven", "forge", "Fergie", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: Alteration (due to give) of Middle English foryiven, forȝiven, from Old English forġiefan (“to forgive, to give”), from Proto-West Germanic *frageban, from Proto-Germanic *fragebaną (“to give away; give up; release; forgive”), equivalent to for- + give (ety… 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 forgive, spelled F-O-R-G-I-V-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.