invitation

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for invitation is 10 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ɪn.vɪˈteɪ.ʃən/. Corpus data places it at rank #5,700 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 6 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 invitation, with forms such as "inivtation", "innvitation", and "inviattion". 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 6 confusable-pair relationships, "irritation", "invocation", "invitational", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English invitacioun, ynvytacioun, from Latin invītātio, reinforced by Middle French invitation. By surface analysis, invite + -ation. Displaced native Middle English lathinge from Old English laþung (see dialectal English lathing). 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 invitation, spelled I-N-V-I-T-A-T-I-O-N, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.