index

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for index is 5 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈɪndɛks/. Corpus data places it at rank #2,628 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 14 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 7 documented wrong-spelling variants for index, with forms such as "idnex", "inddex", and "indexx". 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, "Indy", "Indo", "Indi", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Latin index (“a discoverer, informer, spy; of things, an indicator, the forefinger, a title, superscription”), from indicō (“point out, show”); see indicate. 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 index, spelled I-N-D-E-X, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.