gentleman

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for gentleman is 9 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈd͡ʒɛn.təl.mən/. Corpus data places it at rank #5,498 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 14 documented wrong-spelling variants for gentleman, with forms such as "egntleman", "genlteman", and "genntleman". 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, "gentlemen", "gentlemanly", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English gentilman, morphologically gentle + man, partial calque of Old French gentilhome. 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 gentleman, spelled G-E-N-T-L-E-M-A-N, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.