gazelle

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for gazelle is 7 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ɡəˈzɛl/. Corpus data places it at rank #34,075 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "An antelope of either of the genera Gazella (mostly native to Africa), Procapra (native to Asia), Eudorcas, or Nanger, capable of running at high speeds for long periods.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 8 documented wrong-spelling variants for gazelle, with forms such as "agzelle", "gaezlle", and "gazele". 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, "gazette", "Giselle", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: Unadapted borrowing from Middle French gazelle, from Old French gazel, from Arabic غَزَال (ḡazāl). 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 gazelle, spelled G-A-Z-E-L-L-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.