illegal

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for illegal is 7 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ɪˈliːɡəl/. Corpus data places it at rank #2,115 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 5 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 8 documented wrong-spelling variants for illegal, with forms such as "ilegal", "ilelgal", and "illeagl". 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, "illegally", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: Borrowed from French illégal, from Medieval Latin illegalis, from Latin legalis, by surface analysis, il- + legal. In senses relating to immigration, via clipping of illegal alien or illegal immigrant. 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 illegal, spelled I-L-L-E-G-A-L, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.