intelligent

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for intelligent is 11 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ɪnˈtɛlɪd͡ʒənt/. Corpus data places it at rank #4,386 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 5 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 15 documented wrong-spelling variants for intelligent, with forms such as "inetlligent", "inntelligent", and "inteligent". 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 2 confusable-pair relationships, "intelligently", "intelligence", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle French intelligent, from Latin intellegēns (“discerning”), present active participle of intellegō (“understand, comprehend”), itself from inter (“between”) + legō (“choose, pick out, read”). 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 intelligent, spelled I-N-T-E-L-L-I-G-E-N-T, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.