imprison

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for imprison is 8 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ɪmˈpɹɪzən/. Corpus data places it at rank #34,122 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "To put in or as if in prison; confine somebody against their will.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 12 documented wrong-spelling variants for imprison, with forms such as "immprison", "impirson", and "impprison". 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, "imprisoned", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: Inherited from Middle English imprisonen, emprisounen, emprisonen, from Old French emprisonner. Equivalent to im- + prison. 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 imprison, spelled I-M-P-R-I-S-O-N, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.