isolate

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for isolate is 7 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈaɪ.sə.leɪt/. Corpus data places it at rank #13,000 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 9 documented wrong-spelling variants for isolate, with forms such as "ioslate", "isloate", and "isoalte". 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, "isolated", "inflate", "insulate", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: Back-formation from isolated, from French isolé, from Italian isolato, from Latin īnsulatus (whence also insulate), see -ate (etymology 1, 2 and 3). 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 isolate, spelled I-S-O-L-A-T-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.