intimidate

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for intimidate is 10 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ɪnˈtɪmɪdeɪt/. Corpus data places it at rank #19,372 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "To make timid or afraid; to cause to feel fear or nervousness; to deter, especially by threats of violence.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 14 documented wrong-spelling variants for intimidate, with forms such as "initmidate", "inntimidate", and "intiimdate". 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, "intimidated", "intimate", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Medieval Latin intimidātus, perfect passive participle of Latin intimidō (“to intimidate, terrify”) (see -ate (verb-forming suffix)), from in- (“in”) + timidus (“afraid, timid”) + -ō (verb-forming suffix); see timid. 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 intimidate, spelled I-N-T-I-M-I-D-A-T-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.