ibis

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for ibis is 4 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈaɪ.bɪs/. Corpus data places it at rank #35,763 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "Any of various long-legged wading birds in the family Threskiornithidae, having long downcurved bills used to probe the mud for prey such as crustaceans.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 5 documented wrong-spelling variants for ibis, with forms such as "biis", "ibbis", and "ibiss". 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 20 confusable-pair relationships, "is", "II", "its", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: Mentioned in the Wycliffe Bible as ybyn or ibin, as ibys from 16th century and ibis shortly after. From Latin ībis, from Ancient Greek ἶβις (îbis), from Egyptian h-b-G26 (hbj) (compare Coptic ϩⲓⲃⲱⲓ (hibōi) or ϩⲓⲡ (hip)). 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 ibis, spelled I-B-I-S, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.