interval

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for interval is 8 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈɪntəvəl/. Corpus data places it at rank #10,068 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 7 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 12 documented wrong-spelling variants for interval, with forms such as "inetrval", "innterval", and "interavl". 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, "intervals", "internal", "integral", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English interval, intervalle, from Old French intervalle, entreval, from Latin intervallum (“space between, interval, distance, interval of time, pause, difference; literally, space between two palisades or walls”), from inter (“between”) + vall… 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 interval, spelled I-N-T-E-R-V-A-L, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.