irritate

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for irritate is 8 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈɪɹ.ɪˌteɪt/. Corpus data places it at rank #26,132 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 9 documented wrong-spelling variants for irritate, with forms such as "irirtate", "iritate", and "irriatte". 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, "irritated", "imitate", "irritant", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: Borrowed from Latin irrītātus, perfect passive participle of irrītō (“excite, irritate, incite, stimulate”), see -ate (verb-forming suffix). 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 irritate, spelled I-R-R-I-T-A-T-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.