inflame

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for inflame is 7 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ɪnˈfleɪm/. Corpus data places it at rank #48,291 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 6 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 10 documented wrong-spelling variants for inflame, with forms such as "ifnlame", "infalme", and "infflame". 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, "inflate", "inflated", "inflamed", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English inflammen, enflamen, enflaumen, from Old French enflammer (“to inflame”), from Latin inflammō (“to kindle, set on fire”, verb), from in (“in, on”) + flamma (“flame”), equivalent to in- + flame. 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 inflame, spelled I-N-F-L-A-M-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.