infant

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for infant is 6 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈɪn.fənt/. Corpus data places it at rank #7,236 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 4 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 9 documented wrong-spelling variants for infant, with forms such as "ifnant", "inafnt", and "infannt". 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 14 confusable-pair relationships, "Inman", "Irfan", "insane", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: Inherited from Middle English infaunt, borrowed from Latin īnfantem, accusative masculine singular of īnfāns, nominal use of the adjective meaning 'not able to speak', from īn- (“not”) + fāns, present participle of for (“to speak”). The verb is from Anglo-N… 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 infant, spelled I-N-F-A-N-T, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.