incest

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for incest is 6 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈɪn.sɛst/. Corpus data places it at rank #18,108 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 2 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 9 documented wrong-spelling variants for incest, with forms such as "icnest", "inccest", and "incesst". 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 20 confusable-pair relationships, "inlet", "inept", "inert", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: Learned borrowing from Latin incestus. Displaced Old English mǣġhǣmed (literally “relative-sex”). Doublet of inchaste. 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 incest, spelled I-N-C-E-S-T, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.