hospital

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for hospital is 8 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈhɒs.pɪ.tl̩/. Corpus data places it at rank #905 in overall English word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language.Wiktionary records 3 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our generated misspelling index lists 12 likely wrong-spelling variants for hospital, with forms such as "hhospital", "hopsital", and "hosiptal". 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.It also participates in 1 confusable-pair relationship, "hospitable", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English hospital, hospitall, from Old French hospital (Modern French hôpital), from Late Latin hospitālis, hospitāle (“hospice, shelter, guesthouse”), from noun use of Latin hospitālis (“hospitable”), from hospes (“host, guest”). Doublet of hote… 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 hospital, spelled H-O-S-P-I-T-A-L, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.