infection

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for infection is 9 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ɪnˈfɛkʃən/. Corpus data places it at rank #4,093 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 14 documented wrong-spelling variants for infection, with forms such as "ifnection", "inefction", and "infcetion". 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 15 confusable-pair relationships, "intention", "inflation", "invention", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Old French infection, from Late Latin īnfectiō. Equivalent to infect + -ion. 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 infection, spelled I-N-F-E-C-T-I-O-N, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.