hesitate

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for hesitate is 8 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈhɛz.ɪ.teɪt/. Corpus data places it at rank #9,759 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 3 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 11 documented wrong-spelling variants for hesitate, with forms such as "ehsitate", "heistate", and "hesiatte". 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 3 confusable-pair relationships, "hesitated", "heritage", "hesitant", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: Borrowed from Latin haesitātus, perfect passive participle of haesitō (see -ate (verb-forming suffix)), intensive of haereō (“to hesitate, stick fast; to hang or hold fast”). Displaced native Old English wandian. Compare French hésiter. 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 hesitate, spelled H-E-S-I-T-A-T-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.