interfere

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for interfere is 9 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˌɪn.tɚˈfɪɚ/. Corpus data places it at rank #8,559 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 4 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 interfere, with forms such as "inetrfere", "innterfere", and "intefrere". 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 5 confusable-pair relationships, "intervene", "interfered", "interferon", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Old French entreferir, from entre- + ferir (“to hit, to strike”), itself from the Latin verb ferio. 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 interfere, spelled I-N-T-E-R-F-E-R-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.