ilk

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for ilk is 3 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ɪlk/. Corpus data places it at rank #32,443 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "Very; same.".

No frequent misspelling variants are recorded for ilk in our index, suggesting the orthography either follows predictable English patterns or the word is uncommon enough that typo corpora lack signal.It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "in", "is", "it", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: Inherited from Middle English ilke, from Old English ilca, conjectured as from Proto-Germanic *ilīkaz, a compound of *iz and *-līkaz from the noun *līką (“body”). The sense of “type”, “kind” is from the application of the phrase of that ilk to families: the… 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 ilk, spelled I-L-K, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.