important

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for important is 9 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ɪmˈpɔː.tənt/. Corpus data places it at rank #347 in overall English word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language.Wiktionary records 2 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 14 documented wrong-spelling variants for important, with forms such as "immportant", "imoprtant", and "imporatnt". 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 3 confusable-pair relationships, "impotent", "importantly", "importance", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English important, from Medieval Latin important-, importāns. By surface analysis, import (“to be important”) + -ant. Displaced native Old English heah and hefig. 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 important, spelled I-M-P-O-R-T-A-N-T, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.