illegitimate

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for illegitimate is 12 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ɪlɪˈd͡ʒɪtɪmət/. Corpus data places it at rank #16,497 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 8 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 15 documented wrong-spelling variants for illegitimate, with forms such as "ilegitimate", "ilelgitimate", and "illeggitimate". 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 is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, which tends to mean the word is visually distinctive enough to stand on its own.

Etymologically, the entry records: First attested in 1536, from Latin illēgitimus, most likely an adapted borrowing of Middle French illegitime, equivalent to il- + legitimate, see -ate (etymology 1, 2 and 3). 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 illegitimate, spelled I-L-L-E-G-I-T-I-M-A-T-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.