interrogation

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for interrogation is 13 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ɪnˌteɹ.əˈɡeɪ.ʃən/. Corpus data places it at rank #13,738 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 3 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 18 documented wrong-spelling variants for interrogation, with forms such as "inetrrogation", "innterrogation", and "interogation". 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 3 confusable-pair relationships, "interrogator", "interrogating", "interpolation", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English interrogacion, from Old French interrogacion, from Latin interrogātiō, from interrogō, from inter- (“between; among”) + rogō (“to ask; to request”). Equivalent to inter- + rogation or interrogate + -ion. 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 interrogation, spelled I-N-T-E-R-R-O-G-A-T-I-O-N, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.