inquisition

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for inquisition is 11 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˌɪŋkwɪˈzɪʃən/. Corpus data places it at rank #18,348 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 5 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our generated misspelling index lists 16 likely wrong-spelling variants for inquisition, with forms such as "innquisition", "inqiusition", and "inqquisition". Each variant is a distinct typo pattern an edit-distance generator flags, typically a doubled-consonant error, a silent-letter drop, or a vowel substitution.It also participates in 2 confusable-pair relationships, "inquisitor", "inquisitive", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Old French inquisicion, from Latin inquisitio, from inquirere. The sense implying persecution is influenced by the name of the Spanish Inquisition, which is a cardinal exemplar of government inquisitions that give inquisitions a bad name. 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 inquisition, spelled I-N-Q-U-I-S-I-T-I-O-N, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.