gorilla

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for gorilla is 7 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ɡəˈɹɪl.ə/. Corpus data places it at rank #12,613 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 4 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 8 documented wrong-spelling variants for gorilla, with forms such as "ggorilla", "goirlla", and "gorila". 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 6 confusable-pair relationships, "grill", "grille", "grills", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Ancient Greek Γόριλλαι (Górillai, “Gorillai (a tribe of hairy women)”), described by Hanno the Navigator, a Carthaginian navigator and possible visitor to the area that later became Sierra Leone; the Greek word is likely from Punic, and ultimately from… 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 gorilla, spelled G-O-R-I-L-L-A, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.