information
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
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11 characters
Language
English
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "information", 11-letters, with pronunciation in International Phonetic Alphabet notation, etymology traced through Germanic and Romance roots where applicable, common misspelling variants catalogued from Hunspell error dictionaries, and usage frequency ranked against the top 100,000 English words in the Wordfreq corpus. PlainSpell covers English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and German spelling with confusable-pair detection that highlights visually and phonetically similar words. This entry for "information" includes synonyms, antonyms, homophones, and cross-language translation pointers sourced from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org extract. Whether you are verifying the correct spelling of "information" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
information is aEnglishnoun. It means: Something that provides a definitive characterization or description of the nature and attributes of a specified entity. Pronounced /ˌɪn.fəˈmeɪ.ʃn̩/. It ranks #357 in English word frequency. Often confused with informative and informations.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | information |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /ˌɪn.fəˈmeɪ.ʃn̩/ |
| Letters | 11 |
| Frequency rank | #357 |
| Misspellings tracked | 17 |
| Confusable pairs | 4 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for information is 11 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˌɪn.fəˈmeɪ.ʃn̩/. Corpus data places it at rank #357 in overall English word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language.Wiktionary records 13 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 17 documented wrong-spelling variants for information, with forms such as "ifnormation", "infformation", and "infomration". 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, "informative", "informations", "informational", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English enformacioun, informacioun, borrowed from Anglo-Norman informacioun, enformation, Old French information, from Latin īnfōrmātiō (“formation, conception; education”), from the participle stem of īnformāre (“to inform”). Equivalent to info… 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 information, spelled I-N-F-O-R-M-A-T-I-O-N, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1Something that provides a definitive characterization or description of the nature and attributes of a specified entity.
- 2Things that are or can be known about a given topic; communicable knowledge of something.
- 3The act of informing or imparting knowledge; notification.
- 4A statement of criminal activity brought before a judge or magistrate; in the UK, used to inform a magistrate of an offence and request a warrant; in the US, an accusation brought before a judge without a grand jury indictment.
- 5The act of informing against someone, passing on incriminating knowledge; accusation.
- 6The systematic imparting of knowledge; education, training.
- 7The creation of form; the imparting of a given quality or characteristic; forming, animation.
- 8The meaning that a human assigns to data by means of the known conventions used in its representation.
- 9Divine inspiration.
- 10A service provided by telephone which provides listed telephone numbers of a subscriber.
- 11Any unambiguous abstract data, the smallest possible unit being the bit.
- 12The output resulting from the systematic collection, manipulation and organization of raw data into a structured, interpretable format.
- 13Any ordered sequence of symbols (or signals) (that could contain a message).
Etymology
From Middle English enformacioun, informacioun, borrowed from Anglo-Norman informacioun, enformation, Old French information, from Latin īnfōrmātiō (“formation, conception; education”), from the participle stem of īnformāre (“to inform”). Equivalent to inform + -ation.
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: ifnormation,infformation,infomration,inforamtion,informaiton,informasion,informatino,informationn,informatoin,informattion,informmation,informtaion,inforrmation,infromation,innformation,inofrmation,niformation
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for information
Misspelling Variants of "information"
Frequency rank: #357 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter I in our English index: