hypothesis

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for hypothesis is 10 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /haɪˈpɒθɪsɪs/. Corpus data places it at rank #8,678 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 16 documented wrong-spelling variants for hypothesis, with forms such as "hhypothesis", "hpyothesis", and "hyopthesis". 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 1 confusable-pair relationship, "hypotheses", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: Recorded since 1596, from Middle French hypothese, from Late Latin hypothesis, from Ancient Greek ὑπόθεσις (hupóthesis, “base, basis of an argument, supposition”, literally “a placing under”), itself from ὑποτίθημι (hupotíthēmi, “I set before, suggest”), fr… 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 hypothesis, spelled H-Y-P-O-T-H-E-S-I-S, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.