incompetence

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for incompetence is 12 letters long, classified as anoun. Corpus data places it at rank #16,500 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "An inability to perform; a lack of competence; ineptitude.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 19 documented wrong-spelling variants for incompetence, with forms such as "icnompetence", "inccompetence", and "incmopetence". 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, "incompetent", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From French incompétence, equivalent to in- + competence. 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 incompetence, spelled I-N-C-O-M-P-E-T-E-N-C-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.