incidence

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for incidence is 9 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈɪn.sɪ.dəns/. Corpus data places it at rank #12,258 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 7 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 incidence, with forms such as "icnidence", "inccidence", and "incdience". 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 2 confusable-pair relationships, "incident", "incidents", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle French incidence, from Medieval Latin incidentia (“a falling upon”), from Latin incidens, present participle of incidere (“to fall upon”), from in (“on”) + cadere (“to fall”). 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 incidence, spelled I-N-C-I-D-E-N-C-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.