instance

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for instance is 8 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈɪnstəns/. Corpus data places it at rank #2,540 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 11 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 13 documented wrong-spelling variants for instance, with forms such as "innstance", "insatnce", and "insstance". 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 6 confusable-pair relationships, "instant", "instinct", "issuance", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: Borrowed from Middle French instance, from Latin īnstantia (“a being near, presence, also perseverance, earnestness, importunity, urgency”), from īnstāns (“urgent”); see instant. 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 instance, spelled I-N-S-T-A-N-C-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.