governing
/ˈɡʌvɚnɪŋ/
"governing" is a 9-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“governing” is a regularly-used English word, ranked #5,884 in English word frequency and used as a verb.
- #5,884
- frequency rank, English
- 9
- letters
- 14
- tracked misspellings
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed May 6, 2026) - present participle and gerund of govern
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | governing |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Verb |
| IPA | /ˈɡʌvɚnɪŋ/ |
| Letters | 9 |
| Frequency rank | #5,884 |
| Misspellings tracked | 14 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Where “governing” sits in English frequency
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for governing is 9 letters long, classified as a verb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈɡʌvɚnɪŋ/. Corpus data places it at rank #5,884 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text. The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "present participle and gerund of govern".
Our generated misspelling index lists 14 likely wrong-spelling variants for governing, with forms such as "ggoverning", "goevrning", and "govenring". Each variant is a distinct typo pattern an edit-distance generator flags, typically a doubled-consonant error, a silent-letter drop, or a vowel substitution. No close-neighbour confusable shows up for this headword in our dataset, since nothing in our dataset looks or sounds close enough to cause mix-ups.
No explicit etymology string is stored for this entry, so spelling patterns must be inferred from the word's phoneme-to-grapheme mapping rather than from a documented borrowing chain. The correct English form is governing, spelled G-O-V-E-R-N-I-N-G.
Definition
- 1present participle and gerund of govern
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: ggoverning,goevrning,govenring,goverinng,governign,governingg,governinng,governnig,governning,goverrning,govrening,govverning,gvoerning,ogverning
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
How far each generated variant is from the correct spelling of governing - expressed in single-character edits (insert, delete, or swap one letter). Bigger bars stand out at a glance; a one-edit slip is the hardest to catch.
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA); frequency ordering uses the FrequencyWords open word-frequency list (2018 English corpus, MIT). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Using “governing”
The practical upshot for anyone who landed here from a spell-check.
- The one correct English spelling is G-O-V-E-R-N-I-N-G - every other letter order is a misspelling in standard orthography.
- Say it as /ˈɡʌvɚnɪŋ/ (IPA); tap the speaker on the pronunciation badge to hear it where audio exists.
- Browse more English words and confusable pairs in the same reference. English words
Data Source
Wiktionary (via kaikki.org), licensed under CC BY-SA & GFDL. Word ordering uses an open word-frequency list; misspelling variants are generated by edit-distance from the correct headword.