increase

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for increase is 8 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ɪnˈkɹiːs/. Corpus data places it at rank #877 in overall English word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language.Wiktionary records 4 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 11 documented wrong-spelling variants for increase, with forms such as "icnrease", "inccrease", and "incerase". 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 4 confusable-pair relationships, "increased", "increases", "incase", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English encresen, borrowed from Anglo-Norman encreistre, from Latin increscere (“to increase”), from in (“in, on”) + crescō (“grow”). The noun is from Middle English encres, from the verb. 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 increase, spelled I-N-C-R-E-A-S-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.