incompetent

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for incompetent is 11 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ɪnˈkɒmpətənt/. Corpus data places it at rank #12,078 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 4 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 17 documented wrong-spelling variants for incompetent, with forms such as "icnompetent", "inccompetent", and "incmopetent". 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, "incompetence", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: Borrowed from French incompétent, from Late Latin incompetentem, from Latin incompetēns, equivalent to in- + competent. 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 incompetent, spelled I-N-C-O-M-P-E-T-E-N-T, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.